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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Forces of ’Barbaric Illiteracy’ too Strong |
| 2004-04-19 |
| New book serves as witty eulogy for punctuation Lynne Truss fears the English language could be in its death throes. Proper, written English, that is -- the kind with correctly placed apostrophes, elegantly positioned semicolons, commas in all the right places and in none of the wrong ones. It’s being shoved aside, she thinks, by an electronic onslaught of uncapitalized, unpunctuated, ill-thought-out Internet verbiage. Truss, a longtime writer and editor, is sure that trying to halt the decline would be hopeless, but she wants her new book, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" to at least serve as a warm and funny eulogy to a little-heralded but crucial piece of the language: punctuation. ... "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," whose title comes from a corny punctuation joke about a panda in a bar, is a lighthearted, affectionate tribute to the system of jots, dots and dashes that make written language intelligible. "Sticklers unite," Truss urges in the book’s introduction. "You have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion, and arguably you didn’t have a lot of that to begin with." ... She blames the decline on the failure of schools to teach the basic rules, and on the explosion of communication technologies that have allowed punctuation ignoramuses everywhere to deluge others with their poorly organized thoughts. "People who don’t know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll," she writes. |
| Posted by:Zenster |
| #8 Angie, thanks for the correction, although 'illiterate barbarian' is a little harsh. On a serious note, there have always been different versions of English used in different contexts. For example many people speak informal English (and different variants of informal English), but write formal English. I see no problem with the Internet having a casual style of English. |
| Posted by: Phil B 2004-04-19 10:21:25 PM |
| #7 "Australia wants to make the Wombat it's national animal." "...its national animal," you illiterate barbarian. |
| Posted by: Angie Schultz 2004-04-19 10:11:56 PM |
| #6 "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," The original joke was funnier. "Australia wants to make the Wombat it's national animal." "Why?" "Because it Eats, roots, and leaves!" |
| Posted by: Phil B 2004-04-19 8:28:35 PM |
| #5 Punctuation (and capitalization) do more to improve readability than any amount of graphic design or word-smithing. Dismiss it at your peril. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2004-04-19 7:19:55 PM |
| #4 Don't even have a problem with 1337 speak, either. |
| Posted by: rkb 2004-04-19 7:19:12 PM |
| #3 Truss has a point. Over the years I've hired a lot of people and interviewd a lot more. Inevitably, the programmers, analysts and engineers who were sloppy or ignorant of grammar and punctuation were also inaccurate and sloppy in technical work. I don't have a problem with 133t speak, but if that's the best someone can do, the chances are they will lose out on that technical job to someone from Taiwan or Japan or Korea or Mexico whose English may not be native, but who are much more disciplined in their thought and communications. |
| Posted by: rkb 2004-04-19 7:18:27 PM |
| #2 IIRC, punctuation was introduced during the Middle Ages. Before that, you guessed where the sentence began and ended. Questions were defined by syntax, not punctuation. English uses more punctuation than most languages -- maybe too much. The pendulum swings back and forth. Now it's swinging towards less punctuation. I guess this means muck4do is actually in the vanguard. Frightening. |
| Posted by: 11A5S 2004-04-19 6:16:09 PM |
| #1 Language evolves. Move along... |
| Posted by: Yosemite Sam 2004-04-19 5:52:35 PM |