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[personal profile] stoutfellow
I quickly devoured Lynne Truss' Eats, Shoots and Leaves this afternoon. I found it delightful, the sort of book that amusingly confirms one's own crotchets and reassures one that, for the most part, one is right.

The book is a plea for the proper use of punctuation, giving modest guidelines for each of the major marks and pointing out questions on which the experts differ (and where, therefore, the rest of us are free to make our own choices). The title refers to an infamous reference work which said, of the giant panda, that it "eats, shoots and leaves", which conjures up a picture of a panda firing off a gun before departing from a restaurant. Truss denounces the "greengrocer's apostrophe" (inserted into an otherwise innocuous plural: "banana's, apple's and orange's"), the misuse of quotation marks ("We sell 'pizza' " - which suggests that the thing on offer may, in fact, not be pizza at all), and various other modern atrocities, in particular those which are rampant in instant messages and e-mails.

One particular item that appealed to me was her defense of the hyphen to avoid ambiguity or plain ugliness (e.g., "shell-like", as opposed to the grotesque "shelllike"). This resonates with me because of something which arose in my research. I'm studying a phenomenon known as "duality". In this context, what happens is this: any concept which arises in connection with polygons - triangles in particular - has a "dual" concept. When I began working with this, I referred to any dual by prefixing "co-" to the name of the original concept. (This is fairly standard behavior in connection with dualities.) Thus, I could refer to comidpoints, cobisectors, and the like. Unfortunately, one of the first concepts I wanted to apply this to was that of the medians of a triangle. This does not work - but the much-abused hyphen is the natural remedy.

Anyway, it's a good, funny, and informative book. Recommended.

Date: 2004-07-03 02:10 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] hornedhopper.livejournal.com
It sounds delightful. I'll have to look for it after I do my Vorkosiverse reread.

The misused apostrophe is one of my pet peeves. So often in legal writing or other people's documents the apostrophe faux pas is more striking than the point being made (g)! What irks me is that I find myself mimicking it when responding, catching it, slapping my false-playing fingers, and correcting it (whew) before it goes. I fear that just seeing it too much makes it contagious!

Eats Shoots & Leaves

Date: 2004-07-05 06:23 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coalboy.livejournal.com
Do you recommend -buying- it or is it a one-read book? Piffle started talking about it last year when it came out in the UK.

Re: Eats Shoots & Leaves

Date: 2004-07-06 07:19 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] stoutfellow.livejournal.com
Hmm. That's a hard question to answer. I bought it, and I think there's enough entertaining stuff in it to make (eventual) rereadings worthwhile, but... I don't know. My own reflex is almost always to purchase rather than borrow, but that's idiosyncratic. What factors do you weigh in making such a decision?

Re: Eats Shoots & Leaves

Date: 2004-08-04 08:39 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] coalboy.livejournal.com
Rereadings. If I only want to read it once, I'd get it from the library while I'm living in Chicago. Up here the library budget is much leaner, though interlibrary loan works too, but even so, the budget for this county and the next is about as big as for one branch of the CPL. Of course, I'm still mentally coming off my unlimited borrowings from the stock of the book department at Field's. We denizens of the department always used to say we couldn't afford to leave because we had book habits too expensive to maintain as private persons.

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