Grammar Nazis Quotes

“Editor: a person employed by a newspaper, whose business it is to separate the wheat from the chaff, and to see that the chaff is printed."

Hubbard, Elbert”
― Brandon Collier

“Yes yes yes, we'll get the grammar police onto her first thing. Do they have actual powers of arrest, do you think? Or will they just hang her from the nearest participle?”
― Mick Herron, London Rules

“Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach, police grammar on the Internet.”
― Ruadhán J. McElroy

“Most of these editors, as they call themselves, couldn't even effectively edit a haiku.”
― Frank Black

“Autocorrect: making Twitter pedants delete and re-tweet since 2007.”
― Cassandra Page

“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

“Is language actually getting better, shorter, and easier? Nowadays we often hear exactly the opposite. Teenager slang is awful, students no longer learn Latin, our children — not to mention our president — cannot put together a grammatical sentence. The whimsical poet Ogden Nash was at least half serious in his “Laments for a dying language”:

Coin brassy words at will, debase the coinage;
We're in an if-you-cannot-lick-them-join age,
A slovenliness-provides-its-own-excuse age,
Where usage overnight condones misusage.
Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,
Once English, now a vile orangutanguage.”
― Charles Yang, The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World

“Sonnet of Grammar

Grammar, Oh Grammar,
Whatever you are,
Go away and bother,
The intellectual scholar.
I ain't no intellectual,
Nor am I a scholar,
So bother me not,
With your snobbish affair.
My words come from the soil,
My structure is born on the street.
I didn't even graduate college,
What do I know about literary creed!
Time has come for me to put you in place.
Be an aid to discourse, not an uptight nutcase!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth

“Maintain consistency, achieve success...even with expletives.”
― Erika M. Weinert

“…condemning others’ grammar is one of the most universally accepted snobberies in Western culture.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Language pedantry is snobbery and snobbery is prejudice,” [Deborah] Cameron says. “And that IMHO, s nothing to be proud of.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language