Comments on: Eats, Shoots and Loses Credibility

By: waltcrawford

waltcrawford — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 15:00:12 +0000

I agree with both of you–and I should look up McWhorter’s book, although it’s unlikely to make me less of a (slight) prescriptivist where spelling and grammar are concerned. Of course, Authoritative Texts that aren’t so much that are nothing new: Strunk & White had a fair amount of bad advice and fell into its own proclaimed errors.

By: Michael Golrick

Michael Golrick — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 12:28:24 +0000

For me, one of the biggest results from the book was to get people to actually pay attention to punctuation!

And, by the way, I love your distinction: “I don’t think of this as an American grammatical rule; I think of it as an American typographical rule–I call it the ‘flyspeck rule.’” (With which rule, I agree.)

Now if we could only get people to understand the proper use of:
— I and me
— “inverted commas” (not to be used for emphasis)
— apostrophes.

But I fear it may be a long, continuous fight. Thanks for the smile today!

By: ksol

ksol — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 20:38:59 +0000

Ah, but it is an amusing book! I lightened up on grammar and even spelling considerably after reading McWhorter’s “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue.” He convinced me to relax; it is an evolving language.