Solecism Quotes & Sayings

In truth, even if they have an imperfect insight into their own methods, I still slightly mistrust writers of fiction who are assured literary critics; it makes me suspect that they favour the word over the world it should describe. Such scribes fall victim too easily to the solecism of equating style with morality. — Will Self

Just like a single cell, the character of our lives is determined not by our genes but by our responses to the environmental signals that — Bruce H. Lipton

To have entered a strange house, and to have consumed the best part of a cake without the knowledge or consent of the lawful owners, was a solecism worthy of severe retribution. — Jennifer Worth

The rule is: the word 'it's' (with apostrophe) stands for 'it is' or 'it has'. If the word does not stand for 'it is' or 'it has' then what you require is 'its'. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best', you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave. — Lynne Truss

A judiciary independent of a king or executive alone, is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican government. — Thomas Jefferson

To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned we should have had no conscience. Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph. — Thomas Carlyle

Every author loves to read his own words. — Kirk Gollwitzer

Isaac Deutscher was best known - like his compatriot Joseph Conrad - for learning English at a late age and becoming a prose master in it. But, when he writes above, about the 'fact' that millions of people 'may' conclude something, he commits a solecism in any language. Like many other critics, he judges Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four not as a novel or even as a polemic, but by the possibility that it may depress people. This has been the standard by which priests and censors have adjudged books to be lacking in that essential 'uplift' which makes them wholesome enough for mass consumption. The pretentious title of Deutscher's essay only helps to reinforce the impression of something surreptitious being attempted. — Christopher Hitchens

The most indisputable beauty may be the one that people cannot ever touch. That God exists up there somehow, in the peaks and remote lakes and the sharp wind.

Who knows why that picture stirs joy. It speaks directly to our impermanence and our smallness. — Peter Heller

To purposely concoct older characters of a sunny disposition would be as much of a solecism as deliberately fabricating arrhythmic blacks, spendthrift Jews, slacker Japanese and so on. — Will Self

To believe in luck, if it were not a solecism so to use the word believe, is skepticism. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I felt if I didn't find anything, I would give up a scientific career altogether. — Simon LeVay

It should be only a part of my life, but it isn't. I have only one thing: my work. — Nastassja Kinski

I like texting as much as the next kidult - and embrace it as yet more evidence, along with email, that we live now in the post-aural age, when an unsolicited phone call is, thankfully, becoming more and more understood to be an unspeakable social solecism, tantamount to an impertinent invasion of privacy. — Will Self

When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but in what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion. — Louis Sullivan

A habit that had become one of those necessary things for the night ... surely a body-friendly if not familiar-lying next to you. Someone whose touch is a reassurance, not an affront or a nuissance. Whose heavy breathing neither enrages nor discusts you, but amuses you like that of a cherished pet. — Toni Morrison

A government without the power of defense! It is a solecism. — James Q. Wilson

That it is a solecism to begin a sentence with 'and' is a faintly lingering superstition. The OED gives examples ranging from the 10th to the 19th c.; the Bible is full of them. — Ernest Gowers