Quotes About Standard English

#1. People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

John McWhorter

#2. I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.

William Golding

#3. That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable ... but it is not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to deprecate jazz to appreciate classical music.

John R. Rickford

#4. You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like 'and' that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: They would just pick it up as they would standard English.

Noam Chomsky

#5. Because of the way our society is structures, using sentences such as "I don't it" can put people at a disadvantage. And this is, of course, why teachers have to give students access to Standard English, in order to protect them against this sort of prejudice.

Kate Burridge

#6. Where shall we look for standard English but to the words of a standard man?

Henry David Thoreau

#7. This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.

William Labov

#8. A lot of time, I'd spell things in standard English instead of phonetically because I want people to understand what's going on. It's also very lyrical, and the great thing about lyrical prose is even when you're not totally sure of the words, you can be swayed by the musicality of it.

Marlon James

#9. I'm not very good at standard English.

James Nesbitt

#10. Black English is simpler than standard English in some ways; for example, it often gets by with just 'be' and drops 'am,' 'is,' and 'are.' That's because black English arose when adult African slaves learned the language.

John McWhorter

#11. I find weddings really boring. They give speeches, your aunt kisses you on the cheek, and you're at a boring table. But it's different when it's your own.

Isla Fisher

#12. We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

Raymond Williams

#13. Friends told me not to bother with the silents - they're jerky, poorly photographed and ludicrously badly acted. But I was immediately struck by the freshness and vitality of these films.

Kevin Brownlow

#14. All messages from Satan are played forward and are in standard American English.

George Carlin

#15. Television watching does reduce reading and often encroaches on homework. Much of it is admittedly the intellectual equivalent of junk food. But in some respects, such as its use of standard written English, television watching is acculturative.

Edward Hirsch

#16. God's decree is the very pillar and basis on which the saint's perseverance depends. That decree ties the knot of adoption so fast, that neither sin, death, nor hell, can break it asunder.

Thomas Watson

#17. Always maintain the attitude of a student. When a person thinks they have finished learning, that is when bitterness and disappointment can set in, as that person will wake up everyday wondering when someone is going to throw a parade in their honour for being so smart.

Nick Offerman

#18. Prescriptive grammar has spread linguistic insecurity like a plague among English speakers for centuries, numbs us to the aesthetic richness of non-standard speech, and distracts us from attending to genuine issues of linguistic style in writing.

John McWhorter

#19. In a couple of Ahdaf Soueif's novels, she gets at the certain kind of English that's being spoken by Egyptians. It's a beautiful, expressive English but it is non-standard, "broken" English that happens to be efficient, eloquent, and communicates perfectly well even if it is breaking rules.

Elliott Colla

#20. The realities of life do not allow themselves to be forgotten.

Victor Hugo

#21. It's about a girl who is on the cusp of becoming someone.. A girl who may not know what she wants right now, and she may not know who she is right now, but who deserves the chance to find out.

Jodi Picoult

#22. No matter how irrelevant social class now is, even the most eager egalitarian must be quietly proud that the posh English rose is still an industry standard for peerlessly sophisticated beauty.

Kate Reardon

#23. When I follow the finals of the European Cups, I look at all the aspects surrounding protocol, to get some ideas. I am interested in personalities, sponsors and the stands. But as soon as the whistle goes, it's all on the pitch.

Michel Patini

#24. Actually John, Paul Rutherford, and Trevor Watts, and several other rather well known English jazz musicians had got their training by joining the Air Force, which was a pretty standard way for people to get some kind of musical education in those days.

Evan Parker

#25. Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?

Leslie Fiedler

#26. Plus there was the standard French insult of ignoring your French and answering in English.

Glen Duncan

#27. Our system of private health insurance that fails to provide coverage to so many of our citizens also contributes to the double-digit health care inflation that is making America less competitive in the global economy.

John Conyers

#28. In standard American English, the word with the most gradations of meaning is probably run. The Random House unabridged dictionary offers one hundred and seventy-eight options, beginning with "to go quickly by moving the legs more rapidly than at a walk" and ending with "melted or liquefied." In

Stephen King

#29. An English tongue, if refined to a certain standard, might perhaps be fixed forever.

Jonathan Swift

#30. pay attention to that little voice inside your head that sends you prompts, insights, and hunches. Note things that you don't understand, and rather than shying away from them, turn them into questions to pursue.

Todd Henry

#31. like a disaffected swan -

Eleanor Catton

#32. Milton was the gold standard of religious poets for English and American scholars. But Milton wrote of Hell and Heaven from above and below, respectively, not from the inside: safer advantages.

Matthew Pearl