Linguistic Conventions Quotes

Ordinary language carries with it conditions of meaning which it is easy to recognize by classifying the contexts in which the expression is employed in a meaningful manner.

The meanings of words and the uses of words come from practice from the way people in a given culture use those words.

Let grammar, punctuation, and spelling into your life! Even the most energetic and wonderful mess has to be turned into sentences.

The rules of grammar exist in large part to permit readers and writers to operate from a shared set of expectations.

The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.

What’s strange is how many beginning writers seem to think that grammar is irrelevant, or that they are somehow above or beyond this subject more fit for a schoolchild than the future author of great literature.

Speakers who have grown up in the American community unconsciously know its rules about taking turns in conversations-in the same way that they know the rules of grammar and the rules about appropriate speech in various situations.

When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, I think any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it.

If Miss means respectably unmarried, and Mrs. respectably married, then Ms. means nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Capitalization implies a hierarchy, that some letters are more special than others.

I believe that every English poet should read the English classics, master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them, travel abroad, experience the horrors of sordid passion, and - if he is lucky enough - know the love of an honest woman.

Languages exist by arbitrary institutions and conventions among peoples; words, as the dialecticians tell us, do not signify naturally, but at our pleasure.

The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.

Custom is the most certain mistress of language, as the public stamp makes the current money.

Where shall we look for standard English, but to the words of a standard man?