English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment, and education-sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across a street.

Grammar, n. A system of pitfalls thoughtfully prepared for the feet of the self-made man, along the path by which he advances to distinction.

I believe it is imperative to see modern English grammar as a rich and diverse linguistic system deposited on our [England's] shores 1,500 years ago, and left with us unweakened, though substantially changed by the social and political events of the intervening period.

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

Native speakers of a language know intuitively whether a sentence is grammatical or not. They usually cannot specify exactly what is wrong, and very possibly they make the same mistakes in their own speech, but they know-unconsciously, not as a set of rules they learned in school-when a sentence is incorrect.

Quite naturally, scholars assumed that Latin grammar was not merely Latin grammar, but that it was grammar itself. They borrowed it and made the most of it.

Grammar is not a set of rules; it is something inherent in the language, and language cannot exist without it. It can be discovered, but not invented.

The truth seems to be that they [teachers of grammar] were victims of a mighty hoax, one of those true belly-rumbling impostures which a workaday world can but seldom afford.

It is well to remember that grammar is common speech formulated.

The speaker does not feel the grammatical rules he is said to apply in composing sentences, and men spoke grammatically for thousands of years before anyone knew there were rules.