Grammar

In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules governing the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, emantics, and semantics.

Quotes

• GRAMMAR, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet for the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.
  • Ambrose Bierce, The Cynic's Dictionary (1906); republished as The Devil's Dictionary (1911).

• Grammar is often a generic way of referring to any aspect of English that people object to.
  • Jeremy Butterfield in: Damp Squid: The English Language Laid Bare, Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 142.

• Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.
  • William Cobbett in: A Grammar of the English Language: The 1818 New York First Edition With Passages Added in 1819, 1820, and 1823, Rodopi, 1983, p. 34.

• Forming grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for any submission to social laws. No one is supposed to be ignorant of grammaticality; those who are belong in special institutions. The unity of language is fundamentally political.
  • Gilles Deleuze in: Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari EPZ Thousand Plateaus, A&C Black, 1-September 2004, p. 112.

• If all commas were in the right place, Shanghai would not be burning.
  • Karl Krauss (1937) as quoted in "The consequences of Richard Weaver" by Roger Kimball

• I learned how important grammar is, that part of the understanding process is grammatical. That’s how I taught myself to write prose. I kept learning and learning. I’d come into my class and say, “Guess what I found out last night. Tenses are a way of ordering the chaos around time.” I learned that grammar was not arbitrary, that it served a purpose, that it helped to form the ways we thought, that it could be freeing as well as restrictive.
  • Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press. 1984. p. 95. ISBN 978-0-89594-142-8. 

• Ego sum rex Romanus, et supra grammaticam.
  • I am the Roman emperor, and above grammar.
  • Emperor Sigismund I, in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1893), p. 78

• the errors of Grammarians have arisen from supposing all words to be immediately either the signs of things or the signs of ideas: whereas in fact many words are merely abbreviations employed for despatch, and are the signs of other words. And that these are the artificial wings of Mercury, by means of which the Argus eyes of philosophy have been cheated.
  • John Horne Tooke, Epea Pteroenta, or, The Diversions of Purley p. 14