I haven’t been the same since Lewis Menand’s review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation—or rather, his review of its author, Lynn Truss, who seems like a sweet lady who’s outed herself doing what we all do furtively: fix bad punctuation in public. Typos and grammatical errors in a stern (in a Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins sort of way) treatise about punctuation and grammar are not quite the thing, I agree. The publisher ought to have corrected them. But why truss up this good woman so? Menand’s snarling seems out of proportion to its cause, and in this piece—in contrast to, say, his meandering but lucid review of Hollywood histories in the current issue—he entangles himself in sentences that would have Lynn Truss herself sighing and prescribing a spoonful of sugar with his Tums.
But all that has passed; the cut man patched her up, and Truss prevailed. What lingers is the problem of the semicolon. Nation copy editor Judith Long, an expert in most things, is generally against them, but I have always argued for their elegance, their sonic and spacial ambiguity, their polymorphous perversity. (See Nicholson Baker’s hilarious essay “The History of Punctuation” in The Size of Thoughts for archaic combinations in which semis play a part.) But Judy continued to say no. That made me doubt. And then, Menand:
“I am not a grammarian,†Truss says. No quarrel there. Although she has dug up information about things like the history of the colon, Truss is so uninterested in the actual rules of punctuation that she even names the ones she flouts—for example, the rule that semicolons cannot be used to set off dependent clauses. (Unless you are using it to disambiguate items in a list, a semicolon should be used only between independent clauses—that is, clauses that can stand as complete sentences on their own.) That is the rule, she explains, but she violates it frequently. She thinks this makes her sound like Virginia Woolf.
The Virginia Woolf bit is over the top—it appears to be as much a dig at Woolf as it is at Truss—but that aside, is he right? Ever since, I have been backing away from semicolons in nearly all situations, and the keyboard key looks anxious, as though I will never return. I used one (Menand-endorsed) above, and it looks just fine. But it wonders if I will someday turn it into a dash, or just a Puritan period. At my next seance, I’ll consult the Woolf crew and report back with their analysis. In any case, Menand undermines his own argument with this:
The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces.
Come now, that’s not criticism! Does this mean Americans can’t write about Channel-swimming, or bull-running, or guiltless sexual abandon, since we’re not generally known for it? I beg to differ.
Bad Comma: Lynne Truss’s strange grammar [New Yorker]
The war of the commas: Eats, Shoots & Leaves is selling like hot cakes in the US and one eminent New York critic is not happy [Guardian]
New Yorker Lynne Truss review [Transblawg]
There Are Many Reasons to Love Louis Menand [Beatrice]
Shoots, Leaves & Eats: Irresistible Food from Plot to Plate [Amazon UK]
Eats, Shites & Leaves: Crap English and How to Use It [Amazon UK]