What is truth? Who wants to know!?
Al Capone
Some day there won’t be any need for books on usage. People will all be connected by a giant electronic network, and when they want to know something about usage or grammar, they will simply type in a phrase and find out how the competent writers use it. Should something be capitalized? Type it into the network and find out. Do we use hyphens between two words (e.g., “fig-leaf” or “fig leaf”)? Type it into the network and find out.
Henry W. Fowler, author of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
That would work, if only it did, but it doesn’t, so it won’t.
General Ned Ludd
I hope nobody notices the sentence fragment at the beginning of Brave New World.
Aldous Huxley
It’s easy to locate your blind spots. Just make a list of your treasured beliefs.
Lady Fancy That
Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarisms, in order to dodge the difficulty.
Guy de Maupassant
Is that why it takes me so long to write anything. I thought it was the booze.
Malcolm Lowry
The problem is, he’s not a Democrat. Here in the U. S. of A., you can come up with 57 different ways of saying of saying that de Maupassant is an ass, and each is as good as any other.
Mark Twain
Guy de Maupassant never read Finnegan’s Wake
Graffito in Library of Congress
Of course there are no dumb questions. That’s because all the dumb was used up on the answers.
Lady Fancy That
Always give your sources.
Somebody or other
Originally published in another dementia on June 21, 2011