A wonderful piece in today’s New York Times on a hit book on…punctuation. Author Lynne Truss was warned that Eats, Shoots & Leaves (I won’t tell you the derivation of the title) would be a book for the select few. But it is the No. 1 best seller in England (and soon to be brought out in the U.S. by Gotham). Times scribe Sarah Lyall reports that Truss ‘leads the reader through the valley of the shadow of comma splice; refers to the apostrophe as ‘our long-suffering little friend’; makes a case for the semicolon’s usefulness in, among other things, ‘calling a bunch of brawling commas to attention’; and describes Woodrow Wilson’s inexplicable visceral hatred of the hyphen.’ Any friend of the semicolon is a friend of mine, and I’m eagerly awaiting the book’s American advent. May I suggest her next topic? The parts of speech. I am being driven batty by the ‘between you and I’ crowd and not just because that’s wrong and grates on my ear. I hate it because it shows we no longer know how English works. I do hope Ms. Truss will consider taking my advice and rescuing the parts of speech.
