British Linguist Quotes

Edith Pargeter

Sara Coleridge

Edward Bouverie Pusey

David Crystal

Tom Shippey

Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others.

Swearing is, as I have said, learning to the ignorant, eloquence to the blockhead, vivacity to the stupid, and wit to the coxcomb.

Here I begin to know that blessedness is what can be snatched out the passing day and put away to think of afterwards.

Chill December brings the sleet, Blazing fire, and Christmas treat.

People with an interest in the workings of any society must also concern themselves with its language — how it is structured and used, what its users believe about it and so on.

Deborah Cameron (linguist)

It was really [David] Whitteridge who taught me to be a scientist.

Peter Ladefoged

Learn to commend thy daily acts to God, so shall the dry every-day duties of common life be steps to heaven, and lift they heart hither.

Edward Bouverie Pusey

There is no absolute virtue in iambic pentameter as such.. however well they may be done. There is no immediate virtue to rhythm even. These things are merely a means to an end.

In contemporary society, advertising is everywhere. We cannot walk down the street, shop, watch television, go through our mail, log on to the Internet, read a newspaper or take a train without encountering it. Whether we are alone, with our friends or family, or in a crowd, advertising is always with us, if only on the label of something we are using.

The books of men have their day and grow obsolete. God's word is like Himself, "the same yesterday, today, and forever."

Robert Payne Smith

We shall work not on the macrocosmic scale of the literary forms, but on the microcosmic scale of the lexical forms.

Your beauty was the first that won the place,
And scaled the walls of my undaunted heart,
Which, captive now, pines in a caitive case,
Unkindly met with rigour for desert;–
Yet not the less your servant shall abide,
In spite of rude repulse or silent pride.

There are, it is true, still a few minor points of life which may serve to demarcate the upper class, but they are only minor ones... When drunk, gentlemen often become amorous or maudlin or vomit in public, but they never become truculent.

Alan S. C. Ross

At the end of time when God judges us humans, I just hope He remembers to judge Himself as well.

The cry that 'fantasy is escapist' compared to the novel is only an echo of the older cry that novels are 'escapist' compared with biography, and to both cries one should make the same answer: that freedom to invent outweighs loyalty to mere happenstance, the accidents of history; and good readers should know how to filter a general applicability from a particular story.