Buying some time here....
In the works: a post on the seventh month, a post on our Pesach trip to Israel, and something on maternal speech. No, I don't have much of a life. Yes, this is my main connection to adult interactions. Well, sort of. Except on May 25th, when I'll be furthering my reluctant career as unpaid motivational speaker. Urgh.
In the meantime, here's what the Mama is reading this month:
I just finished Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. It has a perfect paragraph describing hangovers, but that's not why you should read it. And read American Gods first. Or not. Gaiman has a gift for the extraordinary mundane, an eye for the shabbiness of the ordinary life, and for adeptly turning that inside out. Not a very helpful description, really, unless you are familiar with his work.
Courtesy of the SIL-ly, I've just started Lynne Truss' Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. As someone who has whipped out a pen and corrected signs, this book intrigues me. Yea, as a frustrated on-looker to the devastation of the proper plural and the apostrophe, I am now giddily relieved to find that I'm not alone. I suspect that I lack much of the thoroughness that marks a true stickler such as the author, and I'm fairly certain that my grasp of the semi-colon is not quite what it should be. But I do weep for the apostrophe...
Here is a sentence that made me very happy:
In short, we [sticklers for punctuation] are unattractive know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families. (pg 5)
Ahh, yes. And lo, it is true. With thanks to my too-patient partner, I and my little red pen bid you all a good night.
P.S. for the Strunk and White-inclined among you, yes, I do realize that I have not cited correctly. I haven't found the 'underline' function yet. Educate me!
2 comments:
1. Underline is done like the tag for italics, but replacing the i with a u.
1a. However, italics is more correct; underlining in most cases is a relic from typewriters that couldn't do italics, so underlined instead. (In copyediting, the way to tell the typesetter to italicize something is to underline it.)
I could imagine some would consider a more proper online reference would be to the book's page at the author's site, or where one could buy it on Amazon...
Welcome home. I missed your online presence.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves is on my list and my red pen and your red pen should get together sometime and cry over the apostrophes they've corrected. Actually my Sharpie wants in on that action. I have corrected graffiti on my fav coffee house bathroom wall.
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