Linguists are no different from any other people who spend more than nineteen hours a day pondering the complexities of grammar and its relationship to practically everything else in order to prove that language is so inordinately complicated that it is impossible in principle for people to talk. – Ronald W. Langacker (b.1942), Language and Its Structure, 1973

There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don’t, and I’ll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken. – Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

The great logical, or grammatical, framework of language, (for grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason,) he would possess, he knew not how… – Richard Chenevix Trench, “On the Study of Words,” lecture to the pupils of the D