ORTHOGRAPHY, n. The science of spelling by the eye instead of the ear.
Our speech has its weaknesses and its defects, like all the rest. Most of the occasions for the troubles of the world are grammatical.
The New Oxford Dictionary has declared Sarah Palin's word 'refudiate' to be the 2010 Word of the Year. Palin was honored and said she would do her best to 'dismangle' the English language.
Sarah Palin was delivering a speech and she said 'refudiate.' It's not a word – you have refute and repudiate, and she combined them. A lot of times that will happen and people will confuse combinations of words. I remember a couple years ago John McCain mistakenly combined the words Vice President and Palin.
The greater part of the world's troubles are due to questions of grammar.
Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday
I couldn't possibly have sex with someone with such a slender grasp on grammar!
Even when I use a word in the wrong order in a sentence, I get mad. It's very stressful.
Language is my bugbear. Everyone says things now like 'I was sat' instead of 'I was sitting', which just sounds so ugly.
I speak a little bit of French and German, but apparently, I'm really bad at Dutch. The pronunciations are quite hard. I tried to say 'hello' in Dutch, and it did not work. People were just like, 'What?'
Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can't walk to the bathroom.
By now they had mastered my own language, but they still made simple mistakes, like using 'hermeneutics,' when they meant 'heuristic'.
