Thursday Thirteen - #18

13 Great Quotes and Examples from "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" By Lynne Truss

Please be aware that this does not mean you will find perfect grammar on all posts here at this blog. Only that I find this book hilarious, and have my own little grammar pet peeves, like most English majors.

1. It's tough being a stickler for punctuation these days. One almost dare not get up in the mornings. True, one occasionally hears a marvellous punctuation-fan joke about a panda who "eats, shoots & leaves," but in general the stickler's exquisite sensibilities are assaulted from all sides, causing feelings of panic and isolation.

2. Everywhere one looks, there are signs of ignorance and indifference. What about that film Two Weeks Notice? Guaranteed to give sticklers a very nasty turn, that was - its poster slung along the sides of buses in letters four feet tall, with no apostrophe in sight.

3. I just remember a period when, convinced that an apostrophe was definitely required somewhere, I would cunningly suspend a very small one immediately above the "s", to cover all eventualities.

4. While other girls were out with their boyfriends on Sunday afternoons...I was at home with the wireless listening to an Ian Messiter quiz called, Many a Slip, in which erudite and amusing contestants spotted grammatical errors in pieces of prose.

5. (Talking about the lack of grammatical training in decades past) It is arguable that the timing of their grammatical apathy could not have been worse. In the 1970's, no educationist would have predicted the explosion in universal written communication caused by the personal computer, the Internet and the key-pad of the mobile phone.

6. (cont)But now, look what's happened: everyone's a writer! Everyone is posting film reviews on Amazon that go like this:
"I watched this film a few days ago expecting the usual hugh Grant bumbling...character Ive come to loathe/expect over the years. I was thoroughly surprised. This film was great, on of the best films i have seen in a long time. The film focuses around one man who starts going to a single parents meeting, to meet women, one problem He doesnt have a child"

7. (cont) Isn't this sad? People who have been taught nothing about their own language are (contrary to educational expectations) spending all their leisure hours attempting to string sentences together for the edification of others. And there is no editing on the Internet!

8. To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday" (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive it's (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler.

9. Readers grow so accustomed to the dwindling incidence of commas in public places that when signs go up saying "no dogs please", only one person in a thousand bothers to point out that actually, as a statement, "no dogs please" is an indefensible generalisation, since many dogs do please, as a matter of fact; they rather make a point of it.

10. Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, like this, UP, for hours if necessary, UP, like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots...you stop.

11. Of the objections to the colon and semicolon listed above, there is only one I am prepared to concede: that semicolons are dangerously habit-forming. Many writers hooked on semicolons become an embarrassment to their families and friends. Their agents gently remind them, "George Orwell managed without, you know. And look what happened to Marcel Proust: carry on like this and you're only one step away from a cork-lined room!" But the writers rock back and forth on their office chairs, softly tapping the semicolon key and emitting low whimpers.

12. Inverted commas (or speech marks, or quotes) are sometimes used by fastidious writers as a kind of linguistic rubber glove, distancing them from vulgar words or cliches they are too refined to use in the normal way.

13. Overtly disorganised thought is the mode of most email and (mobile phone) text communication, and the dash does an annoyingly good job in these contexts standing in for all other punctuation marks. "I saw Jim - he looked gr8 - have you seen him - what time is the thing 2morrow - C U there."

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