Language Lines

A gaggle of quotations. Stray observations on grammar and usage, style and syntax, tone and voice. Here's a preview of some of the topics we'll be looking at in the new year.

The Writer's Voice

Voice is not a perfect metaphor for writing style, which is why it's just a metaphor. Writing is much more premeditated than speaking: we are allowed to mull over our words for an awfully long time before setting them down, and once they are down, on the page or screen, we can look at them, puzzle over them, revise them. . . . Yet even the most thoughtful writers can stare at a sentence for a whole day and not realize precisely how readers will "hear" it. A part of style is unintentional or even unconscious; as Richard Burton said, it betrays us.
(Ben Yagoda, The Sound on the Page, HarperCollins, 2005)

The Good, the Bad, and the Competent

There are bad writers who are exact in grammar, vocabulary, and syntax, sinning only through their insensitivity to tone. Often they are among the worst writers of all. But on the whole it can be said that bad writing goes to the roots: It has already gone wrong beneath its own earth. Since much of the language is metaphorical in origin, a bad writer will scramble metaphors in a single phrase, often in a single word. . . .

Competent writers always examine what they have put down. Better-than-competent writers—good writers—examine their effects before they put them down: They think that way all the time. Bad writers never examine anything. Their inattentiveness to the detail of their prose is part and parcel of their inattentiveness to the detail of the outside world.
(Clive James, "Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Lessons on How to Write," Cultural Amnesia, 2007)

You Darn Kids, Get Off My Language! (1899 Version)

It is shameful to see our very colleges filled with students who seldom set down three consecutive sentences that do not reek with solecisms of expression, of syntax, and of style; while not a few, when they leave the college halls, the winners of a university degree, make blunders even of orthography that might well disgrace a swineherd.
(Harry Thurston Peck, "What Is Good English?" 1899)

The Uncorseted English Language

English is a growing language, and we have to let out the tucks so often, that no last season's model will ever fit it. English isn't like French, which is corseted and gloved and clad and shod and hatted strictly according to the rules of the Immortals. We have no Academy, thank Heaven, to tell what is real English and what isn't. Our Grand Jury is that ubiquitous person, Usage, and we keep him pretty busy at his job.
(Gelett Burgess, Burgess Unabridged: A New Dictionary of Words You Have Always Needed, 1914)

Mark Twain on the Bluejay's Grammar


There's more to a bluejay than any other creature. He has got more moods, and more different kinds of feelings than other creatures; and mind you, whatever a bluejay feels, he can put into language. And no mere commonplace language, either, but rattling, out-and-out book talk--and bristling with metaphor, too--just bristling! And as for command of language--why you never see a bluejay get stuck for a word. No man ever did. They just boil out of him! And another thing: I've noticed a good deal, and there's no bird, or cow, or anything that uses as good grammar as a bluejay. You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does--but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you'll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it's the sickening grammar they use. Now I've never heard a jay use bad grammar but very seldom; and when they do, they are as ashamed as a human; they shut right down and leave.
(Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 1880)

Good and Bad Grammar

We need to know Standard English, but we need to know it critically, analytically, and in the context of language history. We also need to understand the regularity of nonstandard variants. If we approach good and bad grammar in this way, the study of language will be a liberating factor--not merely freeing learners from socially stigmatized usage by replacing that usage with new linguistic manners, but educating people in what language and linguistic manners are all about.
(Edwin L. Battistella, Bad Language: Are Some Words Better Than Others? Oxford University Press, 2005)