OT - I don't remember what thread our "apostrophe police" showed up on, but I'll take advantage of the [extended] holiday laxity to post this excerpt about a surprise British bestseller on punctuation: "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation."
Doc
nytimes.com
...
"Eats, Shoots & Leaves" has been sold with great fanfare to the United States, where it will be published by Gotham Books in April. Suddenly, people who once treated Ms. Truss like a nitpicking fussbudget are taking her seriously.
Ms. Truss has always been a whisperer, not a shouter. Much as she is aggrieved to the point of physical distress when she sees a sign advertising "carrot's" for sale, she is not one to cause a scene. "I think most of the people who care about these things are not confrontational people," she said.
But she has had her moments. Writing an article about apostrophe abuse for The Daily Telegraph last spring, for instance, Ms. Truss held aloft a six-inch apostrophe on a stick in Leicester Square, strategically placing it so that the offensively titled Hugh Grant film "Two Weeks Notice" became, for a short, giddy interval, "Two Weeks' Notice." But what was most striking was how few people took her point.
"Most everyone walking past sort of shrugged and gave the usual `get a life' kind of response, which I find so tedious," Ms. Truss said. "It's very belittling. It's obvious that one doesn't only care about apostrophes." |
