{"id":2002,"date":"2004-05-03T10:17:48","date_gmt":"2004-05-03T14:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2004\/05\/03\/2002.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:46:04","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:46:04","slug":"musing-and","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2004\/05\/03\/musing-and\/","title":{"rendered":"Musing, and …"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

James Rosenthal has a very odd column<\/a> in this morning’s Times (which requires registration). He is reacting to Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation<\/I><\/a> by suggesting, it seems, a maximum-tolerance approach to punctuation. “The question that readers and editors should ask is not whether the punctuation violates the rules, but whether the meaning is clear,” Mr. Rosenthal writes.\n

I’m inclined to disagree with Mr. Rosenthal (and to buy the panda bear book), but I am in sympathy with his approach. The best way, I think, would be for everybody to know the rules of grammar and punctuation, and to apply them as a matter of course, instinctively. Then meaning would be clear, and we wouldn’t be distracted by people hollering in the theater when somebody is listed as having designed the stars tattoo’s<\/I>. I recently sent an email to an excellent blogger, who had written an excellent post, but who had mis-itsed the first sentence, which was distracting me. The blogger in question knew the its-it’s rule (it’s<\/I> is a possessive pronoun like her’s<\/I> and hi’s<\/I>, of course), but had mistyped it, and quickly corrected it, and then I could pay attention to the post. Was the problem mine? If I had a higher tolerance, it would saved the blogger and me some effort.\n

Mr. Rosenthal writes “force-feeding the rules of punctuation isn't working.” I have no idea if he’s correct in general; I have no idea if it ever worked in general. Grammar and punctuation rules change with time, as Mr. Rosenthal points out. I was taught that I should never split infinitives, nor start a sentence with And<\/I> or But<\/I>, and that prepositions were words with which sentences should never end. With. Those rules are silly, and outdated, and didn’t contribute to clear writing, and I still tend to follow them unthinkingly. To unthinkingly follow them. Enh. So the force-feeding worked in my case, but not altogether to my benefit. If we eliminate a few commas, it doesn’t seem like much, but it will throw us all off, all of us who know the rules, and use them to learn something about the writer.\n

Yes, I often ignore the rules. Yes, I sprinkle semi-colons around like confetti. Yes, I use a comma as a pause, indicating the melody of the sentence rather than, say, delineating the clauses. No, I am not a Grammar and Punctuation Maven. Gentle Readers, perusing these notes, learn this about me pretty quickly, and use that knowledge to help build an idea of what this Tohu Bohu is like. That’s one of the things I like about having the Grammar and Punctuation Gang out there, correcting us and maintaining fidelity to the rules. They are the standard, against which y’all can judge me, the background to everybody’s foreground. It’s not just a useful job, it’s a beautiful one.\n

                           ,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Rosenthal has a very odd column in this morning’s Times (which requires registration). He is reacting to Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by suggesting, it seems, a maximum-tolerance approach to punctuation. “The…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2002"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17008,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002\/revisions\/17008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}