Today's offering is selections from my commonplace book, some of which you may want to post above your desk or, if you do cross stitch, work into a sampler.
"Any fool can make a rule, and every fool will mind it." Henry David Thoreau
"It's not what we don't know that gets us into trouble, it's what we know that ain't so." Will Rogers
"In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it." George Bernard Shaw
"Try to preserve an author's style, if he is an author and has a style." Wolcott Gibbs
"You write with ease, to show your breeding, / But easy writing's vile hard reading." Richard Brinsley Sheridan, "Clio's Protest"
"The copy desk was like a sieve for prose: the copy editor filtered out impurities without adding anything new." Mary Norris, Greek to Me
"Copy editors are meant to be gnomes working invisibly below deck to ensure that the engine of prose runs smoothly." Geoff Nunberg, Language Log
"Editing raw copy is like looking at your grandmother naked." Rafael Alvarez, Baltimore Sun
"Dictionaries are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true." Samuel Johnson
"Dictionaries are but the depositories of words already legitimated by usage." Thomas Jefferson to John Adams
Languages certainly do follow rules, but they don't follow orders." Peter Sokolowski, Merriam-Webster
"When a grammarian notes that something is wrong, it means that many people are already doing it." Nicholas Ostler, Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin
"The public conversation about language is dominated by a kind of middlebrow irascibility, rather than by patient examination of language facts and their consequences." Lane Greene, Talk on the Wild Side
"The history of prescriptivism about English .. is in part a history of bogus rules, superstitions, half-baked logic, groaningly unhelpful lists, baffling abstract statements, false classifications, contemptuous insiderism and educational malfeasance." Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars
"The error of ... viewers with alarm is in assuming that there is enough magic in pedagogy to teach 'correct' English to the plain people. There is, in fact, too little; even the fearsome abracadabra of Teachers College, Columbia, will never suffice for the purpose. The plain people will always make their own language, and the best that grammarians can do is to follow after it, haltingly, and often without much insight. Their lives would be more comfortable if they ceased to repine over it, and instead gave it some hard study. It is very amusing, and not a little instructive." H.L. Mencken, The American Language
