Bad Grammar Quotes & Sayings

I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar. — Benjamin Disraeli

Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy. — Bertrand Russell

Pleasanter surprise," he managed, backing us away from the threshold. There's the idea. I pushed him gently against the wall and started tugging on his shirt.
"About to get even pleasanter," I murmured against his neck as my fingers found the drawstring of his pants.Bad grammar is such a turn- on. — Diana Peterfreund

In grammar school some of the girls had problems with me. My face was too light. My hair was too long. It was the black-consciousness period, and I felt really bad. — Whitney Houston

I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on thesimple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad. — Bernadette Devlin

Remember never to text and drive, it's bad grammar, even if you have a deadline. You might cross the line and dead may be your destination. Think about it!! — Neil Leckman

I loved Latin
the grammar, the difficult tenses, the history
but for some reason I was very bad at it, shamefully and blushingly bad at it ... In moments of stress the embarrassment of how bad I was at Latin
a subject I loved
really hit me. It was like being laughed at by someone you desperately loved. — Peter Greenaway

He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain. — Jorge Luis Borges

We hurt most who we love the most. Bad grammar, painful truth. — Andy Stanley

Being skilled in Catsism is like being a ninja only deadlier and not so silent. The only bad thing is the sickening grammar you have to use. — Will Advise

Pullum has special vitriol for Elements of Style, which he calls "E. B. White's disgusting and hypocritical revision of William Strunk's little hodgepodge of bad grammar advice and stylistic banalities" or — Robert Lane Greene

It doesn't matter if a man does use bad grammar so long as he is a good provider and doesn't go poking round the pantry to see how much sugar you've used in a week. — L.M. Montgomery

The first is that good writing consists of mastering the fundamentals (vocabulary, grammar, the elements of style) and then filling the third level of your toolbox with the right instruments. The second is that while it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one — Stephen King

Enforcing silence is easy. All you have to do is make it feel like the safest option. You can, for example, make speaking as unpleasant as possible, by creating an anonymous social media account to flood women with virulent personal criticism, sexual harassment, and threats. You can talk over women, or talk down to them, until they begin to doubt that they have anything worthwhile to say. You can encourage men's speech, and ignore women's, so that women will get the message that they are taking up too much room, and contributing too little value. You can nitpick a woman's actual voice - the way she writes, her grammar, her tone, her register, her accent - until she honestly believes she's bad at talking, and spends more time trying to sound 'better' than thinking about what she wants to say.

And if a woman somehow makes it past all this, you can humiliate her anyway. — Sady Doyle

a vast majority of employers now Google your name - yes, Google has become both noun and verb - before they'll consider hiring you. There's your new resume, using the word resume loosely. Bye, bye, control. Statistics are hard to come by, and they tend to be all over the map. Some are from very old surveys or very limited surveys (such as 100 employers). What we know for sure is that somewhere between 35% and 70% of employers now report that they have rejected applicants on the basis of what they found through Google. Things that can get you rejected: bad grammar or gross misspelling on your Facebook or LinkedIn profile; anything indicating you lied on your resume; any badmouthing of previous employers; any signs of racism, prejudice, or screwy opinions about stuff; anything indicating alcohol or drug abuse; and any - to put it delicately - inappropriate content, etc. — Richard N. Bolles

It was the critic Alexander who put me on my guard against unnecessary fault-finding. People should not be sharply corrected for bad grammar, provincialisms, or mispronunciation; it is better to suggest the proper expression by tactfully introducing it oneself in, say, one's reply to a question or one's acquiescence in their sentiments, or into a friendly discussion of the topic itself (not of the diction), or by some other suitable form of reminder. — Anonymous

Bad music is the attempt to imitate something that has very strong rules and grammar. — Carlo Grante

No one ever went to prison because of bad grammar, but the prisons are full of people who are there because of emotional illiteracy. — Gay Hendricks

I used to think things were the way they are for a reason, that there was some hidden meaning. I used to think that this meaning governed the way the world was. But it's an illusion to think that there are good and bad reasons. Grammar is a lie to make us think that what we say is connected by a logic that you'll find if you study it, a lie that gone on for centuries. Because I now know that life just lurches between stability and instability and doesn't obey any law. — Delphine De Vigan

Though bad writing has always been with us, the rules of correct usage are the smallest part of the problem. Any competent copy editor can turn a passage that is turgid, opaque, and filled with grammatical errors into a passage that is turgid, opaque, and free of grammatical errors. Rules of usage are well worth mastering, but they pale in importance behind principles of clarity, style, coherence, and consideration for the reader. — Steven Pinker

Bad art was as good as good art. Grammar and spelling were no longer important. To be clean was no better than to be filthy. Good manners were no better than bad. Family life was derided as an outdated bourgeois concept. Criminals deserved as much sympathy as their victims. Many homes and classrooms became disorderly - if there was neither right nor wrong there could be no basis for punishment or reward. Violence and soft pornography became accepted in the media. Thus was sown the wind, and we are now reaping the whirlwind. — Norman Tebbit

Listen, dis foreign TV channels dey spoil de image of our country. Dese white stations dey make billions of dollars to sell your war and blood to de world ... We no bad like dis. OK, why dem no dey show corpses of deir white people during crisis for TV? Abi, people no dey kill for America or Europe?"
"You dey speak grammar!" someone shouted. "Wetin concern us wid America and Europe? Abeg, give us cable TV."
"Remove dis toilet pictures!" said another.
"So our barracks be toilet now?" the police answered. "What an insult!"
"You na mad mad police," Monica said.
"Ok, cable TV no be for free anymore!" the police said.
"But it's our pictures we are watching on cable TV," Madam Aniema said. "Why should we pay you to see ourselves and our people?"
The police answered, "Because government dey complain say cable TV dey misrepresent dis religious crisis. — Uwem Akpan

Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America, — Dave Barry

The academic bias against subjectivity not only forces our students to write poorly ("It is believed ... ," instead of, "I believe ... "), it deforms their thinking about themselves and their world. In a single stroke, we delude our students into believing that bad prose turns opinions into facts and we alienate them from their own inner lives. — Parker J. Palmer

Illiteracy at the poverty level (mainly a matter of bad grammar) does not alarm me nearly as much as the illiteracy of the well-to-do. — Mary McCarthy

People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else. — B.R. Myers

Your grammar is a reflection of your image. Good or bad, you have made an impression. And like all impressions, you are in total control. — Jeffrey Gitomer

The rules of grammar are mere human statutes, which is why when he speaks out of the possessed the Devil himself speaks bad Latin. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Magic is like bad grammar; hang around it long enough, and it rubs off on you. — Brandon Sanderson

Learning grammar can be viewed as a game that a little boy plays with his father. Daddy talks, the boy listens - perhaps disobeys - and Daddy talks some more. All the while the boy is trying to figure out the grammar that can generate the sentences in Daddy's speech. The boy might occasionally talk back, but there is no guarantee that Daddy will pay any attention. Not that he is a bad father: recall from Chapter 5 that in some cultures, adults do not interact with children until they are socially and linguistically adept. To fully understand the game of language learning, then, Daddy can be assumed only as a rather passive participant. The goal of the game is to learn Daddy's grammar within some finite amount of time: nobody learns forever. — Charles Yang

The sad truth is, S - , most people are not writers. This has nothing to do with literacy - or intelligence, or general culture. There are people who can correct the grammar, spelling, diction, and style of a college English paper with the best of them - who are still not writers. Indeed, most of what gets published in books, magazines, and newspapers is not written by real writers - which is one reason why so much of it is so bad. — Samuel R. Delany

Turning back to embrace the past has been a long, slow lesson not only in self-esteem, but in patriotism - pride in homeland, heritage. It has taken a decade to whip the shame, to mispronounce words and shun grammar when mispronunciation and misspeaking are part of my dialect, to own the bad blood. What I come from has made me who I am. — Janisse Ray

What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime. — George Eliot

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an efffect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic qulaity. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic. — Ernest Hemingway,

Language guardians have often blamed linguists as defenders of bad language: moral and cultural relativism is often tossed in at no extra charge. We as a profession are supposedly promoting the idea that anything goes in grammar... But no, we have never said anything goes in grammar. (...) When it comes to the proper use of language, universal grammar is the ultimate authority. It is not about what rules are deemed reasonable or popular; it is about what rules are true. And one sign for a true rule is that it appears in young children, long before they are polluted by dubious grammatical advice. — Charles Yang

Anyways, the epiphany I just had was this. Maybe guys like me who write with bad grammar and all and sound like what you might think a dipshit should sound like, actually aren't dipshits. We're just regular Joes, makin' the world go 'round. It's those fucks who talk and write so smooth and perfect that they make you feel like a dumbass because you don't. Maybe they're the dipshits. — Bobby Adair

Thou shalt not use the 140 characters limit as an excuse for bad grammar and/or incorrect spelling. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

In school, I hated poetry - those skinny,
Malnourished poems that professors love;
The bad grammar and dirty words that catch
In the mouth like fishhooks, tear holes in speech.
Pablo, your words are rain I run through,
Grass I sleep in. — George Elliott Clarke

This was bad grammar of course, but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia
in our world they usually don't talk at all.
- The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe — C.S. Lewis

He was thinking about men like his Uncle Ted, a Cornishman to his bones, who lived and would die in St. Mawes, part of the fabric of the place, remembered as long as there were locals, beaming out of fading photographs of the Life Boat on pub walls. When Ted died - and Strike hoped it would be twenty, thirty years hence - they would mourn him as the unknown Barrovian Grammar boy was being mourned: with drink, with tears, but in celebration that he had been given to them. What had dark, hulking Brockbank, child rapist, and fox-haired Laing, wife-torturer, left behind in the towns of their birth? Shudders of relief that they had gone, fear that they had returned, a trail of broken people and bad memories. — Robert Galbraith