The New Yorker eats, shoots & leaves Lynne Truss
In the current issue of The New Yorker, Louis Menand analyzes the grammar of bestselling author Lynne Truss in an article that's at times hilarious, at times inspiring. Here's how "Bad Comma" begins:
The first punctuation mistake in "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there.
Warming to his evisceration, Menand leaves blood on the floor and on the walls:
Parentheses are used, wrongly, to add independent clauses to the ends of sentences: "I bought a copy of Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage and covered it in sticky-backed plastic so that it would last a lifetime (it has)." Citation form varies: one passage from the Bible is identified as "Luke, xxiii, 43" and another, a page later, as "Isaiah xl, 3." The word "abuzz" is printed with a hyphen, which it does not have. We are informed that when a sentence ends with a quotation American usage always places the terminal punctuation inside the quotation marks, which is not so. (An American would not write "Who said 'I cannot tell a lie?'") A line from "My Fair Lady" is misquoted ("The Arabs learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning"). And it is stated that The New Yorker, "that famously punctilious periodical," renders "the nineteen-eighties" as the "1980's," which it does not. The New Yorker renders "the nineteen-eighties" as "the nineteen-eighties."
That's pretty bad, but worse follows. Ladies and gentlemen, the indictment:
Then, there is the translation problem. For some reason, the folks at Gotham Books elected not to make any changes for the American edition, a typesetting convenience that makes the book virtually useless for American readers. As Truss herself notes, some conventions of British usage employed in "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" are taboo in the United States-for example, the placement of commas and periods outside quotation marks, "like this". The book also omits the serial comma, as in "eats, shoots and leaves," which is acceptable in the United States only in newspapers and commercial magazines. The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces. Some of Truss's departures from punctuation norms are just British laxness. In a book that pretends to be all about firmness, though, this is not a good excuse. The main rule in grammatical form is to stick to whatever rules you start out with, and the most objectionable thing about Truss's writing is its inconsistency. Either Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor. Still, the book has been a No. 1 best-seller in both England and the United States.
Tiring of Truss and her confused punctuation, Menand devotes the second half of his article to an exploration of the meaning of "voice". This is New Yorker writing of the old school and we should be damned glad that it has made it into the 21st century. Here's a vital observation on "voice": "Grammatical correctness doesn't insure it. Calculated incorrectness doesn't, either. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks of the first-person singular — any of these can enliven prose without giving it a voice. You can set the stage as elaborately as you like, but either the phantom appears or it doesn't." Menand is the real thing and, as he suggests at the beginning of his piece, Truss may well be part of a hoax that a huge number of people, myself included, have fallen for.
