“Don’t you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don’t you believe in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life after death? No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no. One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out ‘Don’t you believe … More Quote of the Day

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.” ― Christopher Hitchens

“Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual.”–Steven Pinker

“Trend-setters are members of upper classes who adopt the styles of lower classes to differentiate themselves from middle classes, who wouldn’t be caught dead in lower-class styles because they’re the ones in danger of being mistaken for them.” ― Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works

“People who practice freedom of expression are terrorizing our grammatical way of life.” ― Bauvard

“Before you judge me as some kind of ‘anything goes’ language heathen, let me just say that I’m not against usage standards. I don’t violate them when I want to sound like an educated person, for the same reason I don’t wear a bikini to a funeral when I want to look like a respectful … More Quote of the Day

“The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.” ― Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century      

“Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer.” ― Ben Goldacre

“It never ceases to amaze me how prosaic, pedestrian, unimaginative people can persistently pontificate about classical grammatical structure as though it’s fucking rocket science. These must be the same people who hate Picasso, because he couldn’t keep the paint inside the lines and the colors never matched the numbers.” ― Abbe Diaz

“Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean ‘More people died’ don’t say “Mortality rose.’” ― C.S. Lewis, Letters to Children