1. "Riled by pedantic reviewers in search of a solecism, Proust said that there was no correctness this side of originality."
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Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts
2. "The rule is: the word 'it's' (with apostrophe) stands for 'it is' or 'it has'. If the word does not stand for 'it is' or 'it has' then what you require is 'its'. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best', you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave."
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Lynne Truss, Eats
3. "The rule is: the word it’s (with apostrophe) stands for it is or it has. If the word does not stand for it is or it has then what you require is its. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, Good food at it’s best, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave."
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Lynne Truss, Eats
4. "She even began to wonder if she had not slipped into a kind of solecism: that the world was only what Clarabel Hoyt perceived and felt, and that its morality and rules of conduct were purely of her own devising. If she was herself something of a work of art, she was also the artist. And what was sin then but a part of the backdrop against which she performed, acted, danced—yes, danced—like Salome before Herod? And the moment of ecstasy would be that when she pressed her lips against those of the severed head of the Baptist!"
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Louis Auchincloss, Her Infinite Variety
5. "Isaac Deutscher was best known—like his compatriot Joseph Conrad—for learning English at a late age and becoming a prose master in it. But, when he writes above, about the ‘fact’ that millions of people ‘may’ conclude something, he commits a solecism in any language. Like many other critics, he judges Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four not as a novel or even as a polemic, but by the possibility that it may depress people. This has been the standard by which priests and censors have adjudged books to be lacking in that essential ‘uplift’ which makes them wholesome enough for mass consumption. The pretentious title of Deutscher’s essay only helps to reinforce the impression of something surreptitious being attempted."
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Quote by Christopher Hitchens