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Forces of âBarbaric Illiteracyâ too Strong
New book serves as witty eulogy for punctuationLynne Truss fears the English language could be in its death throes. Proper, written English, that is -- the kind with correctly placed apostrophes, elegantly positioned semicolons, commas in all the right places and in none of the wrong ones. Itâs being shoved aside, she thinks, by an electronic onslaught of uncapitalized, unpunctuated, ill-thought-out Internet verbiage. Truss, a longtime writer and editor, is sure that trying to halt the decline would be hopeless, but she wants her new book, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" to at least serve as a warm and funny eulogy to a little-heralded but crucial piece of the language: punctuation. ... "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," whose title comes from a corny punctuation joke about a panda in a bar, is a lighthearted, affectionate tribute to the system of jots, dots and dashes that make written language intelligible. "Sticklers unite," Truss urges in the bookâs introduction. "You have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion, and arguably you didnât have a lot of that to begin with." ... She blames the decline on the failure of schools to teach the basic rules, and on the explosion of communication technologies that have allowed punctuation ignoramuses everywhere to deluge others with their poorly organized thoughts. "People who donât know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll," she writes. Posted by: Zenster 2004-04-19 |
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