Language Standards Quotes

I'm not supposed to be phonetically correct or enunciate perfectly.

The notion of 'Queen's English' is usually applied to our pronunciation.

I don't like swearing on the air. As a matter of fact, I'm not a prude, but I go to the movies and then wonder - I asked myself the same question, and I watch HBO and some of the comedy stuff, and I'm constantly asking myself, why have we gone there? It seems like it's unfortunate. It's so cheap.

People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else.

The rules of grammar exist in large part to permit readers and writers to operate from a shared set of expectations.

The fight against bad English is not frivolous.

'Good English' is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.

Why is it suddenly uncool to spell? That's all I want to know.

I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.

Broadsheets can be scathing. But I have respect for broadsheet journalists because they haven't succumbed to degrading themselves, to writing pidgin English with all these terrible colloquialisms, the phrasing of which is just, like, embarrassing.

There's a fashion abroad generally to speak the language as badly as possible. I'm of a mind to start a society for the reinstatement of the letter 't' and the banishment of the glottal stop.

I find righteous denunciations of the present state of the language no less dismaying than the present state of the language.

To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.

I guess I'm concerned that vulgarity has now officially entered the mainstream of our culture, and I think people have to respectfully stand up and say, 'No thanks.'

I would not tolerate profanity from anyone, anytime. I'd blow the whistle, pull you from the court and put you on the bench and talk to you before I would put you back in.

A man's grammar, like Caesar's wife, must not only be pure, but above suspicion of impurity.

Much of the academy on the humanities side, English departments in particular, no longer write what can pass for normal English.

Where shall we look for standard English, but to the words of a standard man?

The ethos of 50 years ago was that there was one kind of English that was right and everything else was wrong; one kind of access that was right and everything else was inferior. Then nobody touched language for two generations. When it gradually came back in, we didn't want to go back to what we did in the 1950s. There's a new kind of ethos now.