Correct Usage Quotes

A word is used "correctly" when the average hearer will be affected by it in the way intended. This is a psychological, not a literary, definition of "correctness". The literary definition would substitute, for the average hearer, a person of high education living a long time ago; the purpose of this definition is to make it difficult to speak or write correctly.

I used Atlantic like I was supposed to.

I, like many annoying pedants, will wince when someone says 'less' when they should have said 'fewer.' But my 'poor' sounds like poo-ah, not pore; and my 'grass' rhymes with mass, not farce. What's wrong with that?

People are possibly not spelling 'Leicester' correctly everywhere round the globe, but they are at least saying it correctly now.

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

I admit I feel funny when I use the word 'whom' as I'm talking to my diapered children, but I persist.

If you can't pronounce a word correctly, just don't use it.

No one complains of the rules of Grammar as fettering Language; because it is understood that correct use is not founded on Grammar, but Grammar on correct use. A just system of Logic or of Rhetoric is analogous, in this respect, to Grammar.