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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 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.
Comments
Aha! I just read the Guardian column, and a mystery of my life has been solved. I spent my childhood reading British novels, and then spent my adulthood arguing that when one is quoting a phrase, the quotation marks can stay inside the period. Turns out the two are not unrelated—as the Guardian writer notes, the Brits allow for some quotes to be “inside the stop”. See? I feel vindicated.