A Quote by Bill Bryson

Making English grammar conform to Latin rules is like asking people to play baseball using the rules of football.

Quote Topics

Asking Baseball Conform English English Grammar Football Grammar Latin Like Making People Play Play Baseball Rules Using

Quote Author

Bill Bryson
American - Writer
Born: December 8, 1951

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin, a language with which it has precious little in common.

Bill Bryson

English grammar is so complex and confusing for the one very simple reason that its rules and terminology are based on Latin - a language with which it has precious little in common. In Latin, to take one example, it is not possible to split an infinitive. So in English, the early authorities decided, it should not be possible to split an infinitive either. But there is no reason why we shouldn't, any more than we should forsake instant coffee and air travel because they weren't available to the Romans.

Bill Bryson

If you want to break the rules of grammar, first learn the rules of grammar.

Kurt Vonnegut

After you've learned two or three basic rules of cinema grammar, you can do what you like - including breaking those rules.

Michelangelo Antonioni

People who think that grammar is just a collection of rules and restrictions are wrong. If you get to like it, grammar reveals the hidden meaning of history, hides disorder and abandonment, links things and brings opposites together. Grammar is a wonderful way of organising the world how you'd like it to be.

Delphine de Vigan

The problem stems from the ADHD. The nutty behavior. You have got all this energy going and you can't focus on anything. It's like games at school - like football. I couldn't play because I couldn't understand the rules. I couldn't get offside. I just couldn't take in the rules.

Shaun Ryder

Baseball and the players association have rules. If you stay within the rules - which say that you can play while you're appealing - I don't see what anyone would be in arms about.

Pete Rose

For most of us the rules of English grammar are at best a dimly remembered thing. But even for those who make the rules, grammatical correctitude sometimes proves easier to urge than to achieve. Among the errors cited in this book are a number committed by some of the leading authorities of this century. If men such as Fowler and Bernstein and Quirk and Howard cannot always get their English right, is it reasonable to expect the rest of us to?

Bill Bryson

Speakers who have grown up in the American community unconsciously know its rules about taking turns in conversations-in the same way that they know the rules of grammar and the rules about appropriate speech in various situations.

Peter Farb

Just as a poet often has license from the rules of grammar and pronunciation, we should like to ask for 'physicists' license from the rules of mathematics in order to express what we wish to say in as simple a manner as possible.

Richard P. Feynman

In that world, 'villain' can simply be a label given to someone who doesn't conform. There are these unwritten rules in Bachelor Nation... I never follow those rules.

Nick Viall

Quite naturally, scholars assumed that Latin grammar was not merely Latin grammar, but that it was grammar itself. They borrowed it and made the most of it.

Charlton Laird

Every English poet should master the rules of grammar before he attempts to bend or break them.

Robert Graves

No one complains of the rules of Grammar as fettering Language; because it is understood that correct use is not founded on Grammar, but Grammar on correct use. A just system of Logic or of Rhetoric is analogous, in this respect, to Grammar.

Richard Whately

By a generative grammar I mean simply a system of rules that in some explicit and well-defined way assigns structural descriptions to sentences. Obviously, every speaker of a language has mastered and internalized a generative grammar that expresses his knowledge of his language. This is not to say that he is aware of the rules of the grammar or even that he can become aware of them, or that his statements about his intuitive knowledge of the language are necessarily accurate.