Thursday, May 12, 2005

Garner on Eating, Shooting and Leaving

If you let your subscription to the Texas Law Review lapse, you missed a 5,000-plus-word essay by Bryan A. Garner, the authority's authority on American English, on the phenomenon of Lynne Truss's "Eats, Shoots & Leaves."

Garner lists errors and inconsistencies from the book, pointedly addresses the missing hyphen in the subtitle's "Zero Tolerance Approach," and quotes James J. Kilpatrick, Barbara Wallraff, Patricia T. O'Conner and yours truly on our quarrels with the book. He even wonders why people love the title so much, before conceding that even his 12-year-old daughter and her friends are in love with the panda joke. Garner continues:

So I won't criticize the main title of the book. But the book itself is a different matter altogether. When people have asked me what I think of it, I've usually responded by summing up its entire message in this way: "Don't know much about punctuation, but wouldn't it be nice if people could sort out their apostrophes?"

There lies the real answer to the question: Why do the experts uniformly disparage a punctuation book that appeals so much to the popular mind? The thing is that many people think they're sticklers when they're not. And Lynne Truss happens to be one of them.
The full article is available on LexisNexis.

10 comments:

Eric "Babe" Morse said...

People love Lynne Truss because she's ding-dang funny. And if you're going to pick the most accessible peeve to pet, it would probably be the apostrophe. Even grade-schoolers can tell you about possessives and plurals.
OK, yes, and it's because humans like to feel superior. And this book makes average people feel they've got a leg up on the masses. The same way folks flock to Nanny 911 or Dr. Laura. "At least I'm not that bad..."

So I guess it's two things:

1. She's funny.
2. We like to feel superior.

...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.

Bill said...

Post of the week! I've somehow avoided "Nanny 911," but I know I'd be addicted pretty fast. I sure do miss Dr. Laura since she lost her D.C. slot.

The thing about Truss and humor, for me, is that Dave Barry does everything she does and more in any of his brief "Ask Mister Language Person" columns.

Amongst our weaponry ...

Bill said...

The "disparage" quote is Garner's, not mine, and although I'm rooting for the singular "they," I don't consider it correct (did I just hear a descriptivist use that word?) at this point.

But Kilpatrick should have found a tastier fish to fry than the "they're" minnow, and I, too, cringe at his reference to the mythical split infinitive. (Great; now I'm hungry for chicken cacciatore.)

On the hyphen and the comma, "Yeah, but ..."

Yes, standards on compound-modifier hyphenation are all over the place, but there is a huge irony in the lack of said hyphen in the very part of the subtitle in which a so-called stickler announces that she has zero tolerance for declining standards.

And while I'm all for the pause comma, I strongly doubt such a pause was intended in "Either this will ring bells for you, or it won't." At least I've never heard that expression used with a pause.

aparker54 said...

I also failed for some reason on LexisNexis, but I found a PDF of the article under the title (Don't Know Much About Punctuation: Notes on a Stickler Wannabe. By: Garner, Bryan A.. Texas Law Review, Apr2005, Vol. 83 Issue 5, p1443) on Academic Search Premier.

aparker54 said...
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Simon Roy Hughes said...

This is all rather old hat. I got the book for Christmas a couple of years ago, and wrote about my opinion of it before the new year.

When Louis Menand had a go at her, I ridiculed him, too.

DMoore said...

I heard Truss speak at a bookstore last year, and when someone asked about the missing hyphen in the subtitle she admitted, a bit sheepishly, that the hyphen should be there but she didn't like the look of "The Zero-tolerance Approach..." on the cover. Kinda undercuts her credibility a bit, no?

DMoore said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
DANIELBLOOM said...

I just read ESL here in Taiwan, in Chinese, where the book has been translated and published by Solution Press, a subsidiary of the Eurasian Book Book in Taipei.

The book sells for the equivalent of US$6 in Taiwan money, and it's in two parts: the first part of the book is in Mandarin, translated by Tsai Su-mei, and the second part is in English, retyped it seems, with dozens of typos, "sunds" for "sounds" for example.

But other than the slipshod English section, I loved the book, her writing, her style. Go on you, Lynne Truss.

Btw, does anyone know her email address or how I can get in touch with her in the UK? I googled but could not find her email address anywhere.

I want to ask her if she has ever heard of the term "atomic typo" and where the term comes from.

More here:

http://atomictypo.blogspot.com/

Examples of an atomic typo are: unclear or nuclear, sudan or sedan, crist or christ.....in other words, a small, very small typograhic mistake, that ends up making a HUGE difference in the meaning!!!

EXAMPLE: letter to editor: [Tom Morris of Jupiter flagged an atomic typo in the May 14 article, "Crist to run Martinez's Senate campaign," about Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist and U.S. Senate candidate Mel Martinez. Regarding the quote, " 'We share the same values, conservative values,' Christ said," Morris noted: "It's printed Christ, C-h-r-i-s-t, instead of Crist, C-r-i-s-t. I'm sure Christ doesn't back Sen. Martinez's campaign. I think it is a mistake and should be corrected."]

DANIELBLOOM said...

Bill,

My question here is WHY is an atomic typo called an ATOMIC typo? Because the typo is minute? But aren't all typos minute and that's why we call them typos? Does it have anything to do with the Atomic Age or the atomic chart?

If you have space and time and inclination one day, can you do an entire blog about this term and let's find out what others think!