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National Grammar Day (was yesterday....oops)“We owe much to our mother tongue. It is through speech and writing that we understand each other and can attend to our needs and differences. If we don't respect and honor the rules of English, we lose our ability to communicate clearly and well. In short, we invite mayhem, misery, madness, and inevitably even more bad things that start with letters other than M.”
—Martha Brockenbrough, grammarian and founder, National Grammar Day and SPOGG The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar
Also, From the (gender-specific) Fun-With-Grammar Dept.:
“Constructing passive sentences is a way of concealing your own testicles, lest someone cut them off.”
—Sir Ian Holm as the psychoanalyst Dr. Ernesto Morales in the film “The Treatment,” 2006
. . . and From the Nit-Picking Pedantry Department:
“Ancient attitudes to grammar still survive: many people are in awe of it, know little about it, tend to fear or dislike it, often find it baffling and boring if exposed to it at school, and yet a minority is fascinated by it: a field in which precise scholarship and nit-picking pedantry have coexisted for centuries.”
—“Grammar” entry in The Oxford Companion to the English Language, 1992
Editorial Comment: Conjugate this.
News Note: Debate over journalism@Utah State
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On Mar 5, 2009, at 7:16 AM, Martha Brockenbrough wrote:
ReplyDeleteWuhoo! I’m a Ted Quote and I’m not even dead (that I know of).
Cheers,
Martha Brockenbrough
THINGS THAT MAKE US [SIC]- St. Martin's Press, October 2008
- Founder, the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar
Mad, maybe. But we're never dead. That's the power of words and their grammas.
ReplyDeleteMy newswriting students had their midterm yesterday, and whined throughout about the copyediting section. "Do we have to look up EVERY WORD???" they complained. That's a problem for an illiterate age--we who know the alchemy are shunned by those who haven't learned why it matters.
Hugs to you and your gramma...
Ted