UPS

The nice man from UPS just stopped by. I didn't hear him ring the bell, but it set the dogs off, so I ran to the door. As I picked up the package, he waved from the truck and called, "Thanks, man!" I shouted back my thanks. (I'm not sure why he thanks me, but what the heck. Life is enriched.)

In the package: DVDs of "Babylon 5" season 5 and "Buffy" season 6, plus In the Bleak Midwinter (a mystery by Julia Spencer-Fleming, recommended by, among others, hornedhopper), Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (the title is a reference to a joke about a gun-toting panda), Brief Lives (volume 7 of the Sandman series), and Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (I still dabble in linguistics). Also on its way from Amazon via the USPS is Barnes' A Million Open Doors.

I think the "what shall I do this weekend" question has been partly answered...

"Eats, Shoots and Leaves"

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.