Proper Grammar For Quotes

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Tea's proper use is to amuse the idle, and relax the studious, and dilute the full meals of those who cannot use exercise, and will not use abstinence." (Essay on Tea, 1757.)
Samuel Johnson (Works of Samuel Johnson. Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, A Grammar of the English Tongue, Preface to Shakespeare, Lives of the English Poets & more [improved 11/20/2010] (Mobi Collected Works))
I made a list of skills in which I think every adult should gain a working knowledge. I wouldn't expect you to become a master of any, but mastery isn't necessary. Luck has a good chance of finding you if you become merely good in most of these areas. I'll make a case for each one, but here's the preview list. Public speaking Psychology Business Writing Accounting Design (the basics) Conversation Overcoming Shyness Second language Golf Proper grammar Persuasion Technology ( hobby level) Proper voice technique
Scott Adams (How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life)
I am teaching Perry grammar. He says he wants to learn to speak properly. I told him he should not call his Aunt Tom an old beast but he said he had to because she wasn't a young beast.
L.M. Montgomery (Emily of New Moon (Emily, #1))
It takes more time and effort and delicacy to learn the silence of a people than to learn its sounds. Some people have a special gift for this. Perhaps this explains why some missionaries, notwithstanding their efforts, never come to speak properly, to communicate delicately through silences. Although they ''speak with the accent of natives'' they remain forever thousands of miles away. The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.
Ivan Illich
When spreading vicious and damaging gossip about the private affairs of others, one must always use proper grammar and posture.
Scott Rhine
Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they're more of an example to young people than adults books are.
Laura Kreitzer
Not long ago, I advertised for perverse rules of grammar, along the lines of "Remember to never split an infinitive" and "The passive voice should never be used." The notion of making a mistake while laying down rules ("Thimk," "We Never Make Misteaks") is highly unoriginal, and it turns out that English teachers have been circulating lists of fumblerules for years. As owner of the world's largest collection, and with thanks to scores of readers, let me pass along a bunch of these never-say-neverisms: * Avoid run-on sentences they are hard to read. * Don't use no double negatives. * Use the semicolon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't. * Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed. * Do not put statements in the negative form. * Verbs has to agree with their subjects. * No sentence fragments. * Proofread carefully to see if you any words out. * Avoid commas, that are not necessary. * If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing. * A writer must not shift your point of view. * Eschew dialect, irregardless. * And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. * Don't overuse exclamation marks!!! * Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents. * Writers should always hyphenate between syllables and avoid un-necessary hyph-ens. * Write all adverbial forms correct. * Don't use contractions in formal writing. * Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided. * It is incumbent on us to avoid archaisms. * If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is. * Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language. * Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixed metaphors. * Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky. * Never, ever use repetitive redundancies. * Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing. * If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole. * Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration. * Don't string too many prepositional phrases together unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death. * Always pick on the correct idiom. * "Avoid overuse of 'quotation "marks."'" * The adverb always follows the verb. * Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives." (New York Times, November 4, 1979; later also published in book form)
William Safire (Fumblerules: A Lighthearted Guide to Grammar and Good Usage)
Hey Kid-- so proud of you. so is emily. we wish we could be there, but here's a fat check to make up for it but dont go spending it all out on booze. call you soon. Love, the best big brother ever and Emily and Marie, too." I smiled. It was a mark of how much I loved my big brother that I found his lack of punctuation and proper grammar endearing.
Kody Keplinger
American grammar doesn't have the sturdiness of British grammar (a British advertising man with a proper education can make magazine copy for ribbed condoms sound like the Magna goddam Carta), but it has its own scruffy charm
Stephen King
What the hell was it about e-mail that made everybody forget the stuff they learned in second grade, like capitalizing I and proper names, and using periods? Hello? We all learned how to do this less than five years out of diapers!
MaryJanice Davidson (Undead and Unwelcome (Undead, #8))
That's not true, not grammar, and it doesn't even rhyme properly,' said Snufkin, and the subject was dropped.
Tove Jansson (Comet in Moominland (The Moomins, #2))
Grammar, which is the art of using words properly, comprises four parts: Orthography, Etymology, Syntax, and Prosody.
Samuel Johnson (A Grammar of the English Tongue)
Kill?' I realized I could never properly explain that word to this creature toiling here in its garden. Had it ever eaten meat? Could it conjugate the verb 'hunt?
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
Please, for the love of books, use proper grammar when you talk.
Mercy Amare (Losing Grip (New Haven Academy Book 1))
A mad killer or anything, darling. If you’re going to insult our neighbor, let’s use proper grammar to do so.” Brody
Lauren Dane (Coming Undone (Brown Family, #2))
I believe that no great lyric poet ever speaks in the so-called “proper” language of his or her time. Emily Dickinson didn’t write in “proper” English grammar but in slant music of fragmentary perception. Half a world and half a century away, Cesar Vallejo placed three dots in the middle of the line, as if language itself were not enough, as if the poet’s voice needed to leap from one image to another, to make—to use Eliot’s phrase—a raid on the inarticulate. Paul Celan wrote to his wife from Germany, where he briefly visited from his voluntary exile in France: “The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.
Ilya Kaminsky
Style still matters, for at least three reasons. First, it ensures that writers will get their message across, sparing readers from squandering their precious moments on earth deciphering opaque prose. When the effort fails, the result can be calamitous-as Strunk and White put it, "death on the highway caused by a badly worded road sign, heartbreak among lovers caused by a misplaced phrase in a well-intentioned letter, anguish of a traveler expecting to be met at a railroad station and not being met because of a slipshod telegram." Governments and corporations have found that small improvements in clarity can prevent vast amounts of error, frustration, and waste, and many countries have recently made clear language the law of the land. Second, style earns trust. If readers can see that a writer cares about consistency and accuracy in her prose, they will be reassured that the writer cares about those virtues in conduct they cannot see as easily. Here is how one technology executive explains why he rejects job applications filled with errors of grammar and punctuation: "If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it's, then that's not a learning curve I'm comfortable with." And if that isn't enough to get you to brush up your prose, consider the discovery of the dating site OkCupid that sloppy grammar and spelling in a profile are "huge turn-offs." As one client said, "If you're trying to date a woman, I don't expect flowery Jane Austen prose. But aren't you trying to put your best foot forward?" Style, not least, adds beauty to the world. To a literate reader, a crisp sentence, an arresting metaphor, a witty aside, an elegant turn of phrase are among life's greatest pleasures. And as we shall see in the first chapter, this thoroughly impractical virtue of good writing is where the practical effort of mastering good writing must begin.
Steven Pinker (The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century)
Please,’” Mephistopheles added. When Harry raised a dark brow, the ringmaster elaborated. “If you bid your assistant to do something, have the courtesy of using manners. And have a care about using ‘ain’t’—it’s atrocious and distracts from your skill.” “I ain’t worried about it,” he said. “You shouldn’t be, neither. Who else can do the stunts I pull off?” He exaggeratedly glanced around. “No one, that’s who.” “You might yank rainbow-colored unicorns from purple clouds and I’d be distracted by your horrible grammar.” Mephistopheles smiled. “If not for me, do it for the poor unicorns. Magical creatures deserve proper speech.
Kerri Maniscalco (Escaping from Houdini (Stalking Jack the Ripper, #3))
People’s fixation on “proper” grammar or “new terms” often hides a more sinister motive, even if it’s not conscious. They are okay with language shifting as long as it’s the people in power doing it, not us.
Alok Vaid-Menon (Beyond the Gender Binary)
One summer day when I was about ten, I sat on a stoop, chatting with a group of girls my age. We were all in pigtails and shorts and basically just killing time. What were we discussing? It could have been anything—school, our older brothers, an anthill on the ground. At one point, one of the girls, a second, third, or fourth cousin of mine, gave me a sideways look and said, just a touch hotly, “How come you talk like a white girl?” The question was pointed, meant as an insult or at least a challenge, but it also came from an earnest place. It held a kernel of something that was confusing for both of us. We seemed to be related but of two different worlds. “I don’t,” I said, looking scandalized that she’d even suggest it and mortified by the way the other girls were now staring at me. But I knew what she was getting at. There was no denying it, even if I just had. I did speak differently than some of my relatives, and so did Craig. Our parents had drilled into us the importance of using proper diction, of saying “going” instead of “goin’ ” and “isn’t” instead of “ain’t.” We were taught to finish off our words. They bought us a dictionary and a full Encyclopaedia Britannica set, which lived on a shelf in the stairwell to our apartment, its titles etched in gold. Any time we had a question about a word, or a concept, or some piece of history, they directed us toward those books. Dandy, too, was an influence, meticulously correcting our grammar or admonishing us to enunciate our words when we went over for dinner. The idea was we were to transcend, to get ourselves further. They’d planned for it. They encouraged it. We were expected not just to be smart but to own our smartness—to inhabit it with pride—and this filtered down to how we spoke.
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
Here is how one technology executive explains why he rejects job applications filled with errors of grammar and punctuation: “If it takes someone more than 20 years to notice how to properly use it’s, then that’s not a learning curve I’m comfortable with.
Steven Pinker (The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century)
She herself was of the opinion that there would have been no need for a wish consultant if grammar had been taught properly in schools, so that mundanes could be trained to mean exactly what they said. Not wishing to be rude to her guest, however, she kept this opinion to herself.
P.B. Kerr (The Cobra King of Kathmandu (Children of the Lamp, #3))
When one is trying to speak a foreign language without years of schooling in its grammatical nuances, there is one survival strategy that one always falls back on: strip down to the bare essentials, do away with everything but the most critical content, ignore anything that’s not crucial for getting the basic meaning across. The aborigines who try to speak English do exactly that, not because their own language has no grammar but because the sophistication of their own mother tongue is of little use when struggling with a foreign language that they have not learned properly.
Guy Deutscher (Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages)
Essex raised its ugly head. When i was a scholarship boy at the local grammar, son of a city-hall toiler on the make, this country was synonymous with liberty, success, and Cambridge. Now look at it. Shopping malls and housing estates pursue their creeping invasion of our ancient land. A North Sea wind snatched frilly clouds in its teeth and scarpered off to the midlands. The countryside proper began at last. My mother had a cousin out here, her family had a big house. I think they moved to Winnipeg for a better life. There! There, in the shadow of that DIY warehouse, once stood a row of walnut trees where me and Pip Oakes - a childhood chum who died aged thirteen under the wheels of an oil tanker - varnished a canoe one summer and sailed it alone the Say. Sticklebacks in jars,. There, right there, around that bend we lit a fire and cooked beans and potatoes wrapped in silver foil! Come back, oh, come back! Is one glimpse all I get?
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
But the remarkable thing about the beetles was their sensitivity to all the grammar and directives and slogans and even unstated desires of the ant world, which they learned to manipulate. They first memorized the proper antenna-vibration and foreleg-tap which the ants themselves used to request food. The poor workers, busy going here and there and back again all day and never getting a chance to think, automatically assumed that these fearsome strangers had been authorized by the Central Committee since they knew the password, and so they regurgitated a drop or two of fruit juice on cue, much the same as when one is traveling across Europe or Asia on the train and a person in uniform requests one’s passport, one’s ticket, takes them away, and comes back, or else does not come back, having sold them; a badge and a superior manner can obtain anything in this world.
William T. Vollmann (You Bright and Risen Angels (Contemporary American Fiction))
Every person of intelligence should be able to use his mother tongue correctly. It only requires a little pains, a little care, a little study to enable one to do so, and the recompense is great. Consider the contrast between the well-bred, polite man who knows how to choose and use his words correctly and the underbred, vulgar boor, whose language grates upon the ear and jars the sensitiveness of the finer feelings. The blunders of the latter, his infringement of all the canons of grammar, his absurdities and monstrosities of language , make his very presence a pain, and one is glad to escape from his company. The proper grammatical formation of the English language , so that one may acquit himself as a correct conversationalist in the best society or be able to write and express his thoughts and ideas upon paper in the right manner, may be acquired in a few lessons.
Joseph Devlin (How To Speak And Write Correctly)
Quintilian suggests literatura as the proper translation of Greek grammatike (II, i), and literatura, though it does not mean ‘literature’, included a good deal more than literacy. It included all that is required for ‘making up’ a ‘set book’: syntax, etymology, prosody, and the explanation of allusions. Isidore makes even history a department of Grammar (I, xli–xliv). He would have described the book I am now writing as a book of Grammar. Scholarship is perhaps our nearest equivalent.
C.S. Lewis (The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature)
Latin, Arithmetic, Grammar, all were locked up for an hour in the dingy schoolroom. The teacher might be a noun if he wished, and a proper one at that, but they meant to enjoy themselves. As long as skating was as perfect as this, it made no difference whether Holland were on the North Pole or the Equator; and, as for Philosophy, how could they bother themselves about inertia and gravitation and such things, when it was as much as they could do to keep from getting knocked over in the commotion.
Mary Mapes Dodge (Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates)
Our parents had drilled us under the importance of using proper diction, of saying “going” instead of “goin” and “isn’t” instead of “ain’t “. We were taught to finish off words. They bought us a dictionary and a full Encyclopedia Britannica set, which lived on a shelf in the stairwell to our apartment, its titles etched in gold. Any time we had a question about a word, or a concept, or some piece of history, they directed us toward those books. Dandy, too, was an influence, meticulously correcting our grammar and admonishing us to enunciate our words when we went over for dinner. The idea was we were to transcend, to get ourselves further. They’d planned for it. They encouraged it. We were expected not just to be smart but to own our smartness – to inhabit it with pride – and this filtered down to how we spoke.
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
1. True trolls are internet users who set out to ruin someone else’s day. Everyone else is merely someone who disagrees with you, which is allowed. It is hard to differentiate between someone who is ‘generally disagreeable to the entire world’ and ‘currently disagreeing with me’. So we move to… 2. They can’t speak proper, innit. Their punctuation, spelling or grammar is so far round the spout it’s actually random. Of course, this could also indicate someone with a learning difficulty, so to be kind we need to check off some more identifying factors such as… 3. They say extremely unreasonable things. Not just ‘Yeah well, so what, copper?’ but posting on the Facebook memorial pages of murdered children that they deserved it, searching out women to call them whores, or sending rape and death threats. This isn’t normal debate. 4. They are not friends with logic. If you question them, ask them why or suggest substantiating this or that, they will scream, kick a table or call you a Nazi. 5. The sheer volume of their posts –either in word count or frequency –indicates a serious personality disorder. 6. If you saw them on the bus, you would sit elsewhere.
Susie Boniface (Bluffer's Guide to Social Media (Bluffer's Guides))
While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood's), at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procur'd Xenophon's Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charm'd with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter. And being then, from reading Shaftesbury and Collins, become a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine, I found this method safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore I took a delight in it, practis'd it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into concessions, the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved. I continu'd this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons; or I imagine it to be so; or it is so, if I am not mistaken. This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engag'd in promoting; and, as the chief ends of conversation are to inform or to be informed, to please or to persuade, I wish well-meaning, sensible men would not lessen their power of doing good by a positive, assuming manner, that seldom fails to disgust, tends to create opposition, and to defeat every one of those purposes for which speech was given to us, to wit, giving or receiving information or pleasure. For, if you would inform, a positive and dogmatical manner in advancing your sentiments may provoke contradiction and prevent a candid attention. If you wish information and improvement from the knowledge of others, and yet at the same time express yourself as firmly fix'd in your present opinions, modest, sensible men, who do not love disputation, will probably leave you undisturbed in the possession of your error. And by such a manner, you can seldom hope to recommend yourself in pleasing your hearers, or to persuade those whose concurrence you desire. Pope says, judiciously:           "Men should be taught as if you taught them not,           And things unknown propos'd as things forgot;" farther recommending to us "To speak, tho' sure, with seeming diffidence." And he might have coupled with this line that which he has coupled with another, I think, less properly, "For want of modesty is want of sense." If you ask, Why less properly? I must repeat the lines,           "Immodest words admit of no defense,           For want of modesty is want of sense." Now, is not want of sense (where a man is so unfortunate as to want it) some apology for his want of modesty? and would not the lines stand more justly thus?           "Immodest words admit but this defense,           That want of modesty is want of sense." This, however, I should submit to better judgments.
Benjamin Franklin (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin)
It is worth nothing that their neologisms, pronounciations and simplified grammar was quickly adopted by both the simplest people in the ports and by the so-called best people; and from the ports this way of speaking spread out into the newspapers and was soon in general use. Even many humans stopped attending to grammatical gender, word endings were dropped, declinations disappeared; our golden youth neglected to say r properly and learned to lisp; few educated people were any longer certain what was meant by 'indeterminism' or 'transcendent', simply because these words, even for human beings, were too long and too hard to pronounce. In short, for good or for ill, the newts became able to speak almost every language of the world according to what coast they lived on. About this time, some of the Czech national newspapers began to complain bitterly, no doubt with good reason, that none of the newts could speak their language. If there were salamanders who could speak Portuguese, Dutch and the languages of other small nations why were there none that could speak Czech? It was true, they conceded in regretful and learned terms, that Czechoslovakia had no sea coasts, and that means there will be no marine newts here, but that does not mean that Czechs should not play the same part in the culture of the world as many of the other nations whose language was being taught to thousands of newts, or perhaps even a greater part. It was only right and proper that the newts should also have some knowledge of Czech culture; but how were they to be informed about it if none of them knew the Czech language? It was not likely that someone somewhere in the world would acknowledge this cultural debt and found a chair in Czech and Czechoslovak literature at one of the newt universities. As the poet puts it, 'Trust no-one in the whole wide world, we have no friends out there'.
Karel Čapek (War with the Newts)
In short, it was entirely natural that the newts stopped being a sensation, even though there were now as many as a hundred million of them; the public interest they had excited had been the interest of a novelty. They still appeared now and then in films (Sally and Andy, the Two Good Salamanders) and on the cabaret stage where singers endowed with an especially bad voice came on in the role of newts with rasping voices and atrocious grammar, but as soon as the newts had become a familiar and large-scale phenomenon the problems they presented, so to speak, were of a different character. (13) Although the great newt sensation quickly evaporated it was replaced with something that was somewhat more solid - the Newt Question. Not for the first time in the history of mankind, the most vigorous activist in the Newt Question was of course a woman. This was Mme. Louise Zimmermann, the manager of a guest house for girls in Lausanne, who, with exceptional and boundless energy, propagated this noble maxim around the world: Give the newts a proper education! She would tirelessly draw attention both to the newts' natural abilities and to the danger that might arise for human civilisation if the salamanders weren't carefully taught to reason and to understand morals, but it was long before she met with anything but incomprehension from the public. (14) "Just as the Roman culture disappeared under the onslaught of the barbarians our own educated civilisation will disappear if it is allowed to become no more than an island in a sea of beings that are spiritually enslaved, our noble ideals cannot be allowed to become dependent on them," she prophesied at six thousand three hundred and fifty seven lectures that she delivered at women's institutes all over Europe, America, Japan, China, Turkey and elsewhere. "If our culture is to survive there must be education for all. We cannot have any peace to enjoy the gifts of our civilisation nor the fruits of our culture while all around us there are millions and millions of wretched and inferior beings artificially held down in the state of animals. Just as the slogan of the nineteenth century was 'Freedom for Women', so the slogan of our own age must be 'GIVE THE NEWTS A PROPER EDUCATION!'" And on she went. Thanks to her eloquence and her incredible persistence, Mme. Louise Zimmermann mobilised women all round the world and gathered sufficient funds to enable her to found the First Newt Lyceum at Beaulieu (near Nice), where the tadpoles of salamanders working in Marseilles and Toulon were instructed in French language and literature, rhetoric, public behaviour, mathematics and cultural history. (15) The Girls' School for Newts in Menton was slightly less successful, as the staple courses in music, diet and cookery and fine handwork (which Mme. Zimmermann insisted on for primarily pedagogical reasons) met with a remarkable lack of enthusiasm, if not with a stubborn hostility among its young students. In contrast with this, though, the first public examinations for young newts was such an instant and startling success that they were quickly followed by the establishment of the Marine Polytechnic for Newts at Cannes and the Newts' University at Marseilles with the support of the society for the care and protection of animals; it was at this university that the first newt was awarded a doctorate of law.
Karel Čapek (War with the Newts)
Speech results from the joint exercise of the best and noblest faculties of human nature, from our rational understanding and our social affection; and is, in the proper use of it, the peculiar ornament and distinction of man, whether we compare him with other orders in the creation, or view him as an individual preëminent among his fellows.
Goold Brown (The Grammar of English Grammars)
Language guardians have often blamed linguists as defenders of bad language: moral and cultural relativism is often tossed in at no extra charge. We as a profession are supposedly promoting the idea that anything goes in grammar... But no, we have never said anything goes in grammar. (...) When it comes to the proper use of language, universal grammar is the ultimate authority. It is not about what rules are deemed reasonable or popular; it is about what rules are true. And one sign for a true rule is that it appears in young children, long before they are polluted by dubious grammatical advice.
Charles Yang (The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World)
Public speaking Psychology Business writing Accounting Design (the basics) Conversation Overcoming shyness Second language Golf Proper grammar Persuasion Technology (hobby level) Proper voice technique
Scott Adams (How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life)
Broadly speaking, it seems that teachers help you know and understand and coaches help you practise and get better. Returning to the notion of how we are useful to our students, which do your students need most from you? The following questionnaire can help you think about this further.   Your turn 2 Underlying philosophies Grade each statement from 1 (don’t agree) to 10 (agree completely). Make a note of your answers, if you wish, to discuss with a colleague. a) Learning a language means learning words and rules. b) Learning a language means repeatedly using it. c) People learn best by noticing and working things out. d) They learn best by communicating with other people. e) Mistakes show that students have not understood the grammar properly. f) They show that they have not practised enough. g) Speaking is a conscious, cognitive process. h) Speaking is an automatic habit.   Perhaps all of these statements are true for you. Still, you may have found that you favour some more than others. Notice how a), c), e) and g) promote the idea of language as knowledge to learn, a bit like maths or music theory, whereas b), d), f) and h) reflect the side of learning that involves practising a skill, more like tennis or playing the piano. If you think that the skill side of language learning is particularly important, you will probably feel comfortable thinking of yourself as a language coach, someone whose main job is to get students practising and improving. If you see language as knowledge, the question to ask yourself is how your students can best acquire that knowledge, from you teaching it to them or from other sources of reference and input?
Daniel Barber (From English Teacher to Learner Coach)
Rules for the Use and Arrangement of Words The following rules for the use and arrangement of words will be found helpful in securing clearness and force. 1. Use words in their proper sense. 2. Avoid useless circumlocution and "fine writing." 3. Avoid exaggerations. 4. Be careful in the use of not ... and, any, but, only, not ... or, that. 5. Be careful in the use of ambiguous words, e. g., certain. 6. Be careful in the use of he, it, they, these, etc. 7. Report a speech in the first person where necessary to avoid ambiguity. 8. Use the third person where the exact words of the speaker are not intended to be given. 9. When you use a participle implying when, while, though, or that, show clearly by the context what is implied. 10. When using the relative pronoun, use who or which, if the meaning is and he or and it, for he or for it. 11. Do not use and which for which. 12. Repeat the antecedent before the relative where the non-repetition causes any ambiguity. 13. Use particular for general terms. Avoid abstract nouns. 14. Avoid verbal nouns where verbs can be used. 15. Use particular persons instead of a class. 16. Do not confuse metaphor. 17. Do not mix metaphor with literal statement. 18. Do not use poetic metaphor to illustrate a prosaic subject. 19. Emphatic words must stand in emphatic positions; i. e., for the most part, at the beginning or the end of the sentence. 20. Unemphatic words must, as a rule, be kept from the end. 21. The Subject, if unusually emphatic, should often be transferred from the beginning of the sentence. 22. The object is sometimes placed before the verb for emphasis. 23. Where several words are emphatic make it clear which is the most emphatic. Emphasis can sometimes be given by adding an epithet, or an intensifying word. 24. Words should be as near as possible to the words with which they are grammatically connected. 25. Adverbs should be placed next to the words they are intended to qualify. 26. Only; the strict rule is that only should be placed before the word it affects. 27. When not only precedes but also see that each is followed by the same part of speech. 28. At least, always, and other adverbial adjuncts sometimes produce ambiguity. 29. Nouns should be placed near the nouns that they define. 30. Pronouns should follow the nouns to which they refer without the intervention of any other noun. 31. Clauses that are grammatically connected should be kept as close together as possible. Avoid parentheses. 32. In conditional sentences the antecedent or "if-clauses" must be kept distinct from the consequent clauses. 33. Dependent clauses preceded by that should be kept distinct from those that are independent. 34. Where there are several infinitives those that are dependent on the same word must be kept distinct from those that are not. 35. In a sentence with if, when, though, etc. put the "if-clause" first. 36. Repeat the subject where its omission would cause obscurity or ambiguity. 37. Repeat a preposition after an intervening conjunction especially if a verb and an object also intervene. 38. Repeat conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, and pronominal adjectives. 39. Repeat verbs after the conjunctions than, as, etc. 40. Repeat the subject, or some other emphatic word, or a summary of what has been said, if the sentence is so long that it is difficult to keep the thread of meaning unbroken. 41. Clearness is increased when the beginning of the sentence prepares the way for the middle and the middle for the end, the whole forming a kind of ascent. This ascent is called "climax." 42. When the thought is expected to ascend but descends, feebleness, and sometimes confusion, is the result. The descent is called "bathos." 43. A new construction should not be introduced unexpectedly.
Frederick William Hamilton (Word Study and English Grammar A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses)
If I talk about my handkerchief, I can, perhaps, produce the object I am referring to out of my pocket. I can't produce the meaning of the expression, " my handkerchief ", out of my pocket. Because Russell confused meaning with mentioning, he thought that if there were any expressions having a uniquely referring use, which were what they seemed (i.e. logical subjects) and not something else in disguise, their meaning must be the particular object which they were used to refer to. Hence the troublesome mythology of the logically proper name.
Peter Frederick Strawson (Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar)
Possibly the subtlest enforcer of the status quo is our use of proper nouns—that is, names.
Lawrence Weinstein (Grammar for a Full Life: How the Ways We Shape a Sentence Can Limit or Enlarge Us)
Because uncountable nouns are grammatically singular, they must take singular forms of their verbs.
Farlex International (Complete English Grammar Rules: Examples, Exceptions, Exercises, and Everything You Need to Master Proper Grammar (The Farlex Grammar Book 1))
Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to master the grammar of print and typography. He was thus able to read off the message of coming change in France and America as if he were reading aloud from a text that had been handed to him. In fact, the nineteenth century in France and in America was just such an open book to de Tocqueville because he had learned the grammar of print. So he, also, knew when that grammar did not apply. He was asked why he did not write a book on England, since he knew and admired England. He replied: One would have to have an unusual degree of philosophical folly to believe oneself able to judge England in six months. A year always seemed to me too short a time in which to appreciate the United States properly, and it is much easier to acquire clear and precise notions about the American Union than about Great Britain. In America all laws derive in a sense from the same line of thought. The whole of society, so to speak, is founded upon a single fact; everything springs from a simple principle. One could compare America to a forest pierced by a multitude of straight roads all converging on the same point. One has only to find the center and everything is revealed at a glance. But in England the paths run criss-cross, and it is only by travelling down each one of them that one can build up a picture of the whole.
Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man)
De Tocqueville’s contrast between England and America is clearly based on the fact of typography and of print culture creating uniformity and continuity. England, he says, has rejected this principle and clung to the dynamic or oral common-law tradition. Hence the discontinuity and unpredictable quality of English culture. The grammar of print cannot help to construe the message of oral and nonwritten culture and institutions. The English aristocracy was properly classified as barbarian by Matthew Arnold because its power and status had nothing to do with literacy or with the cultural forms of typography.
Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man)
As is obvious, my idea is that consciousness does not properly belong to the individual existence of man, but rather to the social and gregarious nature in him; that, as follows therefrom, it is only in relation to communal and gregarious utility that it is finely developed; and that consequently each of us, in spite of the best intention of understanding himself as individually as possible, and of "knowing himself," will always just call into consciousness the non-individual in him, namely, his "averageness";—that our thought itself is continuously as it were outvoted by the character of consciousness—by the imperious "genius of the species" therein—and is translated back into the perspective of the herd. Fundamentally our actions are in an incomparable manner altogether personal, unique and absolutely individual—there is no doubt about it; but as soon as we translate them into consciousness, they do not appear so any longer.... This is the proper phenomenalism and perspectivism as I understand it: the nature of animal consciousness involves the notion that the world of which we can become conscious is only a superficial and symbolic world, a generalised and vulgarised world;—that everything which becomes conscious becomes just thereby shallow, meagre, relatively stupid,—a generalisation, a symbol, a characteristic of the herd; that with the evolving of consciousness there is always combined a great, radical perversion, falsification, superficialisation, and generalisation. Finally, the growing consciousness is a danger, and whoever lives among the most conscious Europeans knows even that it is a disease. As may be conjectured, it is not the antithesis of subject and object with which I am here concerned: I leave that distinction to the epistemologists who have remained entangled in the toils of grammar (popular metaphysics). It is still less the antithesis of "thing in itself" and phenomenon, for we do not "know" enough to be entitled even to make such a distinction. Indeed, we have not any organ at all for knowing or for "truth"; we "know" (or believe, or fancy) just as much as may be of use in the interest of the human herd, the species; and even what is here called "usefulness" is ultimately only a belief, a fancy, and perhaps precisely the most fatal stupidity by which we shall one day be ruined.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Ehsan Sehgal Quotes about Wikipedia --- * If you are jobless, you do not have the proper ability, even if you can’t get a cleaning job, join Wikipedia, or become an editor. You may knock all the educated figures, lawyers, professional journalists, academics, and specialists of the various subjects down by the Wikipedia rules and policies that contradict each other. You have a useful weapon, which is called consensus. Your friends can support you in winning all disputes. You can change from wrong to right and right to wrong. You can decide the reliability and assessment of subjects; however, no matter whether you qualify for that or not, you have multiple tools for harassing others. That means Wikipedia. * The duffer’s heaven is Wikipedia, where academic ones are the house arrested and used for their shelter of qualification. * Wikipedia is the best place for poor grammar. * If one desires to explore the unique idiots and fools, Wikipedia has that and such a place. * The scholarly world rejects Wikipedia as a reliable website because most of the world’s silly clowns contribute their ignorance within the garbage of Wiki-Rules, which also, indeed, contradict each other. * You cannot delete this, whether with due or undue weight. It is social media, not Wikipedia. * One cannot trust Wikipedia since its articles have minute or continual variant content in all subjects, which demonstrates a lack of qualification and vision. One may find the most authentic and reliable articles on websites that even have no editorial board. * Notability cannot prevail in any subject’s reality. * Virtually, Wikipedia rules are not the law of the judiciary, approved by the majority of the parliament that applied accurately and precisely within its context. Conversely, Wikipedian rules, in other words, tools are only garbage of the frustrated and ignorant heads, which support the blackmailers for blackmailing and comfort for its founding architecture, and also fools who have to execute nothing other than fighting, wasting time. Consequently, every second Wikipedia, having no established and qualified paid editorial board, stays as an encyclopedia of Idiots-Pedia. Thus, it endorses itself as unreliable and untrustworthy an ordinary website, where educationally-unmatured children contribute and decide one’s notability, alongside ignorant ones as well.
Ehsan Sehgal
ASL conveys the differences between subject and object as specifically as English does. It simply employs a change of direction rather than a change of pronouns or of sign order. Liz uses the grammar of ASL, which is perfectly clear and reasonable to the students, to teach them English grammar, which they find so unwieldy. The former is nothing they were ever taught; they acquired it naturally through use, just as hearing students understand how to form proper English sentences before they ever receive any formal instruction. This method ultimately serves two purposes. As the students learn the rules of English grammar, they are also receiving a subtler message: that ASL has an equally complex and worthy grammar, a grammar they have already mastered.
Leah Hager Cohen (Train Go Sorry)
That begins to get at chesed: it is wild, passionate, irresistible, formidable, decimating platitudes and boundaries and proper grammar. Chesed is how God loves me. How God loves you, too. At
Karen Dabaghian (A Travelogue of the Interior: Finding Your Voice and God's Heart in the Psalms)
Optimizing London Park Lane City Apartments Maintenance For Greater Success Most imperative for any new site is drawing in guests. Ensure that you have designed your website well and that you use search engine advertising to bring in visitors. There're a number of internet marketing tools available to you; make use of them to get the very best results. Here are some great recommendations on how to make a booming website. The most popular websites are well designed in appearance in addition to content. The experts advise against getting too creative with oddball fonts or crazy color schemes, or including so many graphics that the message gets lost in the confusion. Do not depend on your own eyes to catch blunders in spelling, punctuation, or grammar. Even minor blunders in grammar, spelling, or punctuation make people question your professionalism and credibility. If your website has been designed to run successfully on all different browsers then your online business will likely be even more fruitful. Maximizing your traffic can be achieved if your online site is accessed on all devices on any browser. You can lose a lot of visitors if your online site is just compatible with a select few internet browsers. Ensure that you address the issue of browser compatibility problems with your website designer, who will probably be your best friend in fixing this issue. If your pages do not load quickly, you'll have a tough time retaining visitors. Visitors have a relatively short attention span; on average, studies show that you have only five to ten seconds to hook their attention. It's important to do everything you can to effectively ensure quick load times, like compressing images and not using too many of them. Consider using a dedicated server to give your website more speed and precision. Use multiple domains to get a better ranking in search engine results. Using the proper search phrases is essential to driving visitors to your website through searches. The more search phrases are in your domain name, the more visitors your website will receive. Additionally, put copy on the page that is directly related to the search in order to maximize your numbers. London park lane city apartmentss require a high rate of speed in order to be used effectively. The operating speed of your webpage can be improved by using a high-quality hosting site. You can increase your website's speed and functionality by using CSS. The most vital thing to ask a potential designer for your website is how much they know about making your website faster. Choose key phrases that correlate closely with the content on your website. If you emphasize key phrases that do not align with your webpage, you may very well draw visitors you do not want. A poor choice in key phrases could damage your website's reputation. Ask a professional in the internet presence industry to critique your choice of key phrases to ensure you have the very best possible use. Park Lane City Apartments 92 Middlesex St London E1 7EZ 44 20 7377 1763
Park Lane City Apartments
Language is a concrete assemblage that evinces tendencies toward stability. This tendency toward stability in language Deleuze and Guattari call the being major of a language. In order for a language to be major it must have the support of numerous other assemblages, particularly a government powerful enough to declare a language “official” and pass laws with regard to what language a government’s business is to be conducted in. Government-sponsored education bolsters the language’s status by ensuring the teaching of the “proper” rules of grammar. At the same time, however, other forces destabilize a language. Everyday usage, borrowings from other languages, literature, and slang continually disturb the stability of a major language. As a concrete assemblage, a language is the dated, singular zone of stability that is the result of intensive processes with tendencies toward both stasis and change. A Thousand Plateaus is the exploration of assemblages or plateaus in which Deleuze and Guattari demonstrate how to create concepts in a way that does not presuppose a metaphysics of discontinuity.
Brent Adkins (Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Critical Introductions and Guides))
The rule of the vital few says that the minority of things matter a great deal and the majority of things don’t matter a lot. The key is to focus on just a couple of crucial things and disregard the rest. Your task becomes manageable again, and you keep going with much less effort. When you apply this rule during the stage of conscious incompetence, you’ll reduce the risk of giving up. In the case of learning languages, it’s usually the ability to communicate with native speakers – basic sentences and phrases are much more important than proper grammar or getting the intonation right. In the case of building a business, it’s getting your first client, the next one, and the next one. Leave thinking about more complex business tasks for later. In fitness, you don’t have to learn more than a few basic movements (squat, deadlift, bench press, overhead press, chin-up). All the other exercises aren’t necessary for most trainees. Deconstruct each of your goals in a similar way and don’t let the complexity deter you from making progress.
Martin Meadows (Grit: How to Keep Going When You Want to Give Up)
linguists sometimes describe a word as a shibboleth. It means that the word tags you as a member of a certain group or class. For example, if you say irregardless, it tags you as someone who is poorly educated or doesn’t use proper language. Shibboleth
Mignon Fogarty (The Grammar Devotional: Daily Tips for Successful Writing from Grammar Girl)
And since computing and storage power had exploded in 2007, the capacity to do so was suddenly there. It led IBM to a fundamental insight: “Every time we got rid of a linguist, our accuracy went up,” said Gil. “So now all we use are statistical algorithms” that can compare massive amounts of texts for repeatable patterns. “We have no problem now translating Urdu into Chinese even if no one on our team knows Urdu or Chinese. Now you train through examples.” If you give the computer enough examples of what is right and what is wrong—and in the age of the supernova you can do that to an almost limitless degree—the computer will figure out how to properly weight answers, and learn by doing. And it never has to really learn grammar or Urdu or Chinese—only statistics! That
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
As a professional speaker and author, excellent grammar is crucial in my profession. Without the proper use of words and language, I would lose credibility and respect.
Susan C. Young (The Art of Action: 8 Ways to Initiate & Activate Forward Momentum for Positive Impact (The Art of First Impressions for Positive Impact, #4))
Do you think the United States is currently a united or a divided country? If you are like most people, you would say the United States is divided these days due to the high level of political polarization. You might even say the country is about as divided as it has ever been. America, after all, is now color-coded: red states are Republican; blue states are Democratic. But, in Uncharted, Aiden and Michel note one fascinating data point that reveals just how much more divided the United States once was. The data point is the language people use to talk about the country. Note the words I used in the previous paragraph when I discussed how divided the country is. I wrote, “The United States is divided.” I referred to the United States as a singular noun. This is natural; it is proper grammar and standard usage. I am sure you didn’t even notice. However, Americans didn’t always speak this way. In the early days of the country, Americans referred to the United States using the plural form. For example, John Adams, in his 1799 State of the Union address, referred to “the United States in their treaties with his Britanic Majesty.” If my book were written in 1800, I would have said, “The United States are divided.” This little usage difference has long been a fascination for historians, since it suggests there was a point when America stopped thinking of itself as a collection of states and started thinking of itself as one nation.
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are)
In Frege’s conception of logic, a logical law states an absolutely general truth—one whose truth every rational being must, on pain of contradiction, acknowledge. In later Wittgenstein’s practice, a grammatical remark inherits an aspect of Frege’s conception of the logical. On a proper understanding of a grammatical remark, it articulates a truism— something that admits of no contrary—hence something that every speaker of the language must acknowledge. Or conversely, if there is something in a given candidate grammatical remark that proves to admit of disagreement, then the remark in question cannot serve its methodological role. It fails to bring into view a point of (what later Wittgenstein calls) grammar. Grammatical remarks acquire their point—that is, our need for such reminders derives—from our attempting but failing to achieve a proper reflective understanding of our way around our own language. If the grammatical remark serves its purpose, what is thereby acknowledged is something that can come into view only against the background of a prior failed attempt to achieve a perspicuous overview of our own concepts. A Wittgensteinian grammatical remark comes to life as such only against the background of a philosophical confusion. Logic or grammar for later Wittgenstein, pace Frege, could qualify as a science only if philosophy is one. This also means that, for later Wittgenstein, unlike for Frege, there is no preexisting stock of propositions that constitutes all of the logico-grammatical truths there are. In potentiality there are perhaps indefinitely many, but in actuality the only remarks that actually exercise the power to disclose a philosophico-grammatical truth, for later Wittgenstein, are those that allow us to make progress with the problems that actually vex us in philosophy.
James Ferguson Conant (The Logical Alien: Conant and His Critics)
but let’s just say proper spelling and grammar are kryptonite to racists.
Billy Jensen (Chase Darkness with Me: How One True-Crime Writer Started Solving Murders)
daunting
Farlex International (Complete English Grammar Rules: Examples, Exceptions, Exercises, and Everything You Need to Master Proper Grammar (The Farlex Grammar Book 1))
Nominalization refers to the creation of a noun from verbs or adjectives.
Farlex International (Complete English Grammar Rules: Examples, Exceptions, Exercises, and Everything You Need to Master Proper Grammar (The Farlex Grammar Book 1))
Grammar as a fetish? To keep rules in proper perspective, violate them by design only. That is, make them tools for manipulation of your reader’s emotions. If that takes sentence fragments, non-punctuation, stream-of-consciousness, and one-word paragraphs, by all means use them. Winston Churchill blazed the trail for all of us when he spoke his mind to the purists who insisted that no sentence end with a preposition: “This is one rule up with which I shall not put!” So, deviate if you must. But do it with malice and by intent, not accident.
Dwight V. Swain (Techniques of the Selling Writer)
That which occludes and that which is occluded have different sources, sites of intractability, forms of appearance, and temporal effects. They derive from geopolitical locations as much as they do from conceptual grammars that render different objects observable, that shape how we observers observe our chosen observers (as Niklas Luhmann might put it), and thereby construe the proper “lessons of empire” and what count as the salient “historical facts.
Ann Laura Stoler (Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (a John Hope Franklin Center Book))
As nervous systems developed, they acquired an elaborate network of peripheral probes—the peripheral nerves that are distributed to every parcel of the body’s interior and to its entire surface, as well as to specialized sensory devices that enable seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. Nervous systems also acquired an elaborate collection of aggregated central processors in the central nervous system, conventionally called the brain.10 The latter includes (1) the spinal cord; (2) the brain stem and the closely related hypothalamus; (3) the cerebellum; (4) a number of large nuclei located above brain-stem level—in the thalamus, basal ganglia, and basal forebrain; and (5) the cerebral cortex, the most modern and sophisticated component of the system. These central processors manage learning and memory storage of signals of every possible sort and also manage the integration of these signals; they coordinate the execution of complex responses to inner states and incoming stimuli—a critical operation that includes drives, motivations, and emotions proper; and they manage the process of image manipulation that we otherwise know as thinking, imagining, reasoning, and decision making. Last, they manage the conversion of images and of their sequences into symbols and eventually into languages—coded sounds and gestures whose combinations can signify any object, quality, or action, and whose linkage is governed by a set of rules called grammar. Equipped with language, organisms can generate continuous translations of nonverbal to verbal items and build dual-track narratives of such items.
António Damásio (The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind)
Language, in the proper sense of the term, is peculiar to man; so that, without a miraculous assumption of human powers, none but human beings can make words the vehicle of thought.
Goold Brown (The Grammar of English Grammars)
proper construction of sentences is very important to good writing. The following
Frederick William Hamilton (Word Study and English Grammar A Primer of Information about Words, Their Relations and Their Uses)
He was a knight of the range, a western hero who quickly became part of popular American folklore. His beliefs and personal habits were sketched as a guideline to those who wrote his adventures. “The Lone Ranger believes that our sacred American heritage provides every individual the right to worship God as he desires. The Lone Ranger never makes love on radio, television, in movies, or in cartoons. He is a man who can fight great odds, yet take the time to treat a bird with a broken wing. The Lone Ranger never smokes, never uses profanity, and never uses intoxicating beverages. The Lone Ranger at all times uses precise speech, without slang or dialect. His grammar must be pure: he must make proper use of ‘who’ and ‘whom,’ ‘shall’ and ‘will,’ ‘I’ and me.’ The Lone Ranger never shoots to kill: when he has to use his guns, he aims to maim as painlessly as possible. Play down gambling and drinking scenes as far as possible, and keep the Lone Ranger out of saloons. When this cannot be avoided, try to make the saloon a cafe, and deal with waiters and food rather than bartenders and liquor.
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
It was the critic Alexander who put me on my guard against unnecessary fault-finding. People should not be sharply corrected for bad grammar, provincialisms, or mispronunciation; it is better to suggest the proper expression by tactfully introducing it oneself in, say, one’s reply to a question or one’s acquiescence in their sentiments, or into a friendly discussion of the topic itself (not of the diction), or by some other suitable form of reminder.
Anonymous
The findings that were deemed believable enough to be published, however, revolutionized ethologists’ thinking. Ethologists began to speak less often of a chasm between man and ape; they began to speak instead of a dividing “line.” And it was a line that, in the words of Harvard primatologist Irven De Vore, was “a good deal less clear than one would ever have expected.” What makes up this line between us and our fellow primates? No longer can it be claimed to be tool use. Is it the ability to reason? Wolfgang Kohler once tested captive chimps’ reasoning ability by placing several boxes and a stick in an enclosure and hanging a banana from the high ceiling by a string. The animals quickly figured out that they could get to the banana by stacking the boxes one atop the other and then reaching to swat at the banana with a stick. (Once Geza Teleki found himself in exactly this position at Gombe. He had followed the chimpanzees down into a valley and around noon discovered he had forgotten to bring his lunch. The chimps were feeding on fruit in the trees at the time, and he decided to try to knock some fruit from nearby vines with a stick. For about ten minutes he leaped and swatted with his stick but didn’t manage to knock down any fruit. Finally an adolescent male named Sniff collected a handful of fruit, came down the tree, and dropped the fruit into Geza’s hands.) Some say language is the line that separates man from ape. But this, too, is being questioned. Captive chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans have been taught not only to comprehend, but also to produce language. They have been taught American Sign Language (ASL), the language of the deaf, as well as languages that use plastic chips in place of words and computer languages. One signing chimp, Washoe, often combined known signs in novel and creative ways: she had not been taught the word for swan, but upon seeing one, she signed “water-bird.” Another signing chimp, Lucy, seeing and tasting a watermelon for the first time, called it a “candy-drink”; the acidic radish she named “hurt-cry-food.” Lucy would play with toys and sign to them, much as human children talk to their dolls. Koko, the gorilla protegee of Penny Patterson, used sign language to make jokes, escape blame, describe her surroundings, tell stories, even tell lies. One of Biruté’s ex-captives, a female orangutan named Princess, was taught a number of ASL signs by Gary Shapiro. Princess used only the signs she knew would bring her food; because she was not a captive, she could not be coerced into using sign language to any ends other than those she found personally useful. Today dolphins, sea lions, harbor seals, and even pigeons are being taught artificial languages, complete with a primitive grammar or syntax. An African grey parrot named Alex mastered the correct use of more than one hundred spoken English words, using them in proper order to answer questions, make requests, do math, and offer friends and visitors spontaneous, meaningful comments until his untimely death at age 31 in 2007. One leading researcher, Ronald Schusterman, is convinced that “the components for language are present probably in all vertebrates, certainly in mammals and birds.” Arguing over semantics and syntax, psychologists and ethologists and linguists are still debating the definitions of the line. Louis Leakey remarked about Jane’s discovery of chimps’ use of tools that we must “change the definition of man, the definition of tool, or accept chimps as man.” Now some linguists have actually proposed, in the face of the ape language experiments, changing the definition of language to exclude the apes from a domain we had considered uniquely ours. The line separating man from the apes may well be defined less by human measurement than by the limits of Western imagination. It may be less like a boundary between land and water and more like the lines we draw on maps separating the domains of nations.
Sy Montgomery (Walking with the Great Apes: Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas)