Feeding The Inner Stickler
Jan. 4th, 2006 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel31 Dec 2005
Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss - Profile Books, 2003
* * * * *
Anyone who cares about language has their bêtes noires - faults of grammar, spelling or punctuation which, when encountered, cause them to see red and throw things round the room. My particular one is "different to" (just typing that is making me pound the keyboard harder). A differs from B; it doesn't differ to it. Even the appalling American formulation "different than" is better.
Sorry. Just had to get that off my chest. Lynne Truss has similar hang-ups, but in her case they extend to the whole of punctuation. She has come up with the rather splendid term "stickler" to describe people for whom failure to conform to the rules of English grammar and syntax is a cause of deep offence. This laugh-out-loud guide to the uses and abuses of the common punctuation marks is a bible (or should that be Bible?) for sticklers everywhere.
After a lengthy introduction, Truss gets down to the business of explaining the rules of usage for the much-abused apostrophe and the equally mishandled comma. She isn't a total martinet - her view is that punctuational infelicities that affect the meaning are genuine errors, but those that don't are a matter of personal taste (so she probably wouldn't share my irritation over over that which, for the sake of my blood pressure, I shall henceforth refer to as different t*). Then she moves on to the colon and the sadly neglected semi-colon, followed by the dashing dash (a mark which, along with sub-clauses in parentheses, I use rather too often) and the hyphen. Her remarks on the way in which semi-colons give shape and balance to a sentence are particularly apposite; I shall endeavour to use them more often, and encourage others to do so too.
The final chapter laments the rise in email and texting and the dreadful effects that these are having on standards of grammar and punctuation (let alone spelling). It is here that Truss' perception of which errors affect meaning and which are a matter of style begins to break down a bit - I don't think that emoticons are the end of the world as we know it, even if the ability to transmit and perceive states of mind through sentence structure and word choice is a dying skill. My guess is that new forms of punctuation will evolve as needed (and to see the extraordinary lengths to which emoticons are evolving in Japan, take a look at this: http://club.pep.ne.jp/~hiroette/en/facemarks/index.html). At the moment we are in a Cambrian Explosion of new punctuation which will eventually settle down as unnecessary and illogical neologisms are weeded out. Trust in linguistic evolution, Ms Truss - meaning will be preserved, though the conventions may sometimes be aesthetically or logically unpleasing. Like different t*.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss - Profile Books, 2003
* * * * *
Anyone who cares about language has their bêtes noires - faults of grammar, spelling or punctuation which, when encountered, cause them to see red and throw things round the room. My particular one is "different to" (just typing that is making me pound the keyboard harder). A differs from B; it doesn't differ to it. Even the appalling American formulation "different than" is better.
Sorry. Just had to get that off my chest. Lynne Truss has similar hang-ups, but in her case they extend to the whole of punctuation. She has come up with the rather splendid term "stickler" to describe people for whom failure to conform to the rules of English grammar and syntax is a cause of deep offence. This laugh-out-loud guide to the uses and abuses of the common punctuation marks is a bible (or should that be Bible?) for sticklers everywhere.
After a lengthy introduction, Truss gets down to the business of explaining the rules of usage for the much-abused apostrophe and the equally mishandled comma. She isn't a total martinet - her view is that punctuational infelicities that affect the meaning are genuine errors, but those that don't are a matter of personal taste (so she probably wouldn't share my irritation over over that which, for the sake of my blood pressure, I shall henceforth refer to as different t*). Then she moves on to the colon and the sadly neglected semi-colon, followed by the dashing dash (a mark which, along with sub-clauses in parentheses, I use rather too often) and the hyphen. Her remarks on the way in which semi-colons give shape and balance to a sentence are particularly apposite; I shall endeavour to use them more often, and encourage others to do so too.
The final chapter laments the rise in email and texting and the dreadful effects that these are having on standards of grammar and punctuation (let alone spelling). It is here that Truss' perception of which errors affect meaning and which are a matter of style begins to break down a bit - I don't think that emoticons are the end of the world as we know it, even if the ability to transmit and perceive states of mind through sentence structure and word choice is a dying skill. My guess is that new forms of punctuation will evolve as needed (and to see the extraordinary lengths to which emoticons are evolving in Japan, take a look at this: http://club.pep.ne.jp/~hiroette/en/facemarks/index.html). At the moment we are in a Cambrian Explosion of new punctuation which will eventually settle down as unnecessary and illogical neologisms are weeded out. Trust in linguistic evolution, Ms Truss - meaning will be preserved, though the conventions may sometimes be aesthetically or logically unpleasing. Like different t*.
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Date: 2006-01-05 07:55 pm (UTC)http://www.uncommonforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=8122
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Date: 2006-01-20 10:44 pm (UTC)Cheers to you both,
Dave