Solecistic Quotes & Sayings

In ways that certain of us are uncomfortable about, SNOOTs' attitudes about contemporary usage resemble religious/political conservatives' attitudes about contemporary culture. We combine a missionary zeal and a near-neural faith in our beliefs' importance with a curmudgeonly hell-in-a-handbasket despair at the way English is routinely manhandled and corrupted by supposedly educated people. The Evil is all around us: boners and clunkers and solecistic howlers and bursts of voguish linguistic methane that make any SNOOT's cheek twitch and forehead darken. A fellow SNOOT I know likes to say that listening to most people's English feels like watching somebody use a Stradivarius to pound nails: We are the Few, the Proud, the Appalled at Everyone Else. — David Foster Wallace

Haemon: No city is property of a single man.
Creon: But custom gives possession to the ruler.
Haemon: You'd rule a desert beautifully alone. — Sophocles

People do complain about the way I act on stage ... They think on stage I act too arrogant, too self-obsessed, solecistic, self-contained, synonyms. — Bo Burnham

In the opera, there was only one great love for the characters. In... tales there was only one love as well - yes, even after death. Everything I had read or sung or felt said this was always the case. If you ignored this great truth, if you gave up on it of being too hard to hold on to, or let it slip away to have mere things, no real meaning could be left in life. — Lenore Hart

Courage lies in being oneself, in showing complete independence, in loving what one loves, in discovering the deep roots of one's feelings. — Fernand Pouillon

And he [Franklin Roosevelt] got the votes of every southern white voting state in the country and wouldn't have been elected president once, let alone four times, if he hadn't. Now, at the same time he acquired over the years a reputation for being sympathetic to blacks, and he got their votes, heaven knows. — William A. Rusher

Had I faltered we would have neither the success nor the international reputation we have. Yet when a woman is strong she is strident. If a man is strong, he's a good guy. — Margaret Thatcher

refrain from fault-finding, and not in a reproachful way to chide those who uttered any barbarous or solecistic or strange-sounding expression; but dexterously to introduce the very expression which ought to have been used, and in the way of answer or giving confirmation, or joining in an inquiry about the thing itself, not about the word, or by some other fit suggestion. — Various