29 books
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Instruction
“
Thamus, as Socrates told the tale, saw a threat to the very nature of philosophical discourse. Here is what the Egyptian king supposedly told the clever god: Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise t
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― A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World
― A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World
“
Grammar belongs in the realm of habit--learned to the point where we are unconscious in our use of it, as we learned it in childhood. Thus to require a choice between 'who' and 'whom' at the beginning of a sentence or between 'I' and 'me' after 'be' or 'than' or 'as' is to invite a centipede to attend to the sequence of his legs in motion.
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― Notes Toward A New Rhetoric, Six Essays For Teachers
― Notes Toward A New Rhetoric, Six Essays For Teachers
