Kinky Friedman Quotes

When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.

Yankees don't understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different.

We are always going to be influenced by America... I watched the word 'bum' go out and 'butt' come in. And part of me says, oh that's a shame, but Aussie boys are still Aussie boys.

Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.

I'm aware now over the last 5 or 10 years that when you do an accent, you really have to kind of get down to the nitty gritty and go into the phonetics of it, if necessary. Find out not just the sounds but the rhythms and the music - or lack thereof - in a particular accent.

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

Tell me the truth - do you think I've lost my Southern accent? I feel it comes back to me only when I'm shouting at fights or at baseball games.

What you hear is southern Michigan, not a drawl, but a halting kind of speech where you leave spaces when there shouldn't be any. We take a breath anywhere.

Why, der language down dar in de far South is jus' as different from ours in Maryland, as you can think. Dey laughed when dey heard me talk, an' I could not understand 'dem, no how.

Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git.

I really like grammar. And spelling. I was a spelling-bee kid. I'm hard-core about grammar.

Whenever I'm in the U.K., people say I have an American accent. Which is, obviously, funny.

The British have slang words, as we do, but it was fun.

These examples of the lack of simplicity in English and French, all appearances to the contrary, could be multiplied almost without limit and apply to all national languages.

Anarchy is as detestable in grammar as it is in society.

Sometimes with 'The New Yorker,' they have grammar rules that just don't feel right in my mouth.

Those English and Scottish know how to do accents.

I'm from the South, and there's a different understanding of how to chop. There's a syllable play. It's a delicate art. Your accent has a lot to do with it. If you're from a certain area, words don't roll of your tongue as slick.

Every sentence stands on its own. Whether that's fair or not, that's kind of the way it is.

I had someone correct my grammar once on a blind date, and within the first 10 minutes the date was over. You just don't correct somebody's grammar. That's just not okay. I'm from Tennessee, so I probably say everything wrong. I might have said 'ain't,' or something like that.

People talk in ungrammatical, unwriterly ways.

I'm pretty sure when I need a comma; I'm not so sure about a semicolon.

I'm over the word 'like' in conversation, and 'you know' seems to be the placeholder of choice, but when I'm writing dialogue, I tend to use those phrases because that's how people talk.

From a linguistic point of view, you can't really take much objection to the notion that a show is a show is a show.

Descriptive grammar is an attempt to give an account of what the current system is for either a society or an individual, whatever you happen to be studying.