I am both a public and a private school boy myself, having always changed schools just as the class in English in the new school w...as taking up Silas Marner, with the result that it was the only book in the English language that I knew until I was eighteen--but, boy, did I know Silas Marner!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating "Low Average Abili...ty," reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The English language may hold a more disagreeable combination of words than "The doctor will see you now." I am willing to concede... something to the phrase "Have you anything to say before the current is turned on?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He is, I think, already pondering a magisterial project: that of buggering the English language, the ultimate revenge of the colon...ialised.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The English language is like a broad river on whose bank a few patient anglers are sitting, while, higher up, the stream is being ...polluted by a string of refuse-barges tipping out their muck.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I suggested to them also the great desirability of a general knowledge on the Island of the English language. They are under an En...glish speaking government and are a part of the territory of an English speaking nation.... While I appreciated the desirability of maintaining their grasp on the Spanish language, the beauty of that language and the richness of its literature, that as a practical matter for them it was quite necessary to have a good comprehension of English.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there ...entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is curious to speculate why pornography is considered especially likely to stimulate its readers into performing the activities... described. The literature of murder is a vast one, particularly in the English language; enormous ingenuity is expended by writers in devising techniques for killing people, and these techniques are described with the greatest possible realism. The motives which would make murder desirable or profitable are so elaborated that they could easily persuade a reader into whose hands these books would be likely to fall that their case was parallel with that described in the book so that their problems could be solved in the same way. But I have never seen it seriously suggested that the literature of murder--detective stories or crime stories--tended to deprave and corrupt, or would incite weak-minded or immature readers into carrying out in reality the activities described in the fantasies. On the contrary, the literature of murder is considered particularly "healthy" and desirable; and in England representatives of all the most respected professions have stated that detective stories are among their favorite reading. Musing about murder is apparently "healthy"; musing about sexual enjoyment is not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »