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Have You Eaten Grandma? QUOTES

Have You Eaten Grandma? QUOTES

1 " Punctuation is important, but the rules are changing. Spelling is important today in a way that it wasn't when Shakespeare was a boy. Grammar isn't set in stone. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

2 " Change is the salt in the soup of life. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

3 " The Brandreth Rule is: when in Rome, do as the Romans do—speak English. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

4 " I love the old, but I'm intrigued by the new. And sometimes excited by it, too. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

5 " Without the Oxford comma, you can give people the wrong idea. Famously, the London Times newspaper once ran a brief description of a television documentary featuring Peter Ustinov, promising: Highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

6 " To err is human. To arr is pirate … What a difference a single misplaced letter can make. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

7 " I aim to anatomise some of the linguistic horrors of our time, work out where we’ve been going wrong (and why), and come up with some tips and tricks to help show how, in future, we can make fewer (rather than ‘less’) mistakes. All right? Is ‘alright’ all right? You’ll find out right here. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

8 " Another survey revealed that while nine out of ten primary school children could identify a Dalek, only a third could recognise and name a magpie. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

9 " At a bus station: TOILETS ONLY FOR DISABLED PREGNANT CHILDREN "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

10 " If an abbreviation with a full stop comes at the end of a sentence, you don’t need to add another full stop: He really loves his asides, anecdotes, incidental stories, etc. Bless. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

11 " The way you use the commas should give your sentence its correct meaning — viz: The men, who were handsome, found partners. There, the relative clause tells us that all the men were handsome and all found partners. The men who were handsome found partners. With this restrictive relative clause, without commas, we are discovering something quite different: here, only the men who were handsome found partners. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

12 " When you recover your old sofa from the skip and get it re-covered, it may take you a while to recover from the cost. (A hyphen can change the very meaning of a word.) "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

13 " STUDENTS GET FIRST HAND JOB EXPERIENCE’ is a newspaper headline that I have seen with my own eyes. I think you’ll agree: it needed a hyphen, either between ‘first’ and ‘hand’ or between ‘hand’ and ‘job’, depending. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

14 " Some people believe that it was while studying the niceties of British and American spelling that the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch painted his masterpiece, ‘The Scream’. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

15 " Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’ — fuck off! No, hold on, it’s the longest word in the dictionary; it’s the name of a lung disease contracted from the inhalation of very fine silica particles, specifically from a volcano; and if you break it down into its constituent parts you can master the spelling quite easily. ‘Pneu-mono-ultra-micro-scopic-silico-volcano-coni-osis.’ There! Done! Hooray! "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

16 " But times change, and at the American Copy Editors Society annual gathering in 2014, two editors from the Associated Press Stylebook, the acknowledged grammar bible, declared that ‘more than and over are both acceptable in all uses to indicate a greater numerical value’. Some diehards protested — ‘More than my dead body!’ read one outraged tweet — but generally, on both sides of the continent, it was agreed: the more than versus over conflict is at an end. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

17 " While an Edwardian dandy might have wooed his dimpled darling with lovey-dovey terms of endearment, a modern Romeo might use a more contemporary line in flattery: ‘Bae, you is one cool, sick, mean bitch. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?

18 " But language is power. Words do make a difference. They can reinforce stereotypes, cause offense, undermine, hurt, and humiliate. You don't have to wrap everything you say in cotton wool, but you should choose your words carefully. Good communication is about courtesy and kindness as well as clarity and getting your message across. "

― Gyles Brandreth , Have You Eaten Grandma?