I am taking her grammatical comments seriously

I wouldn't imagine her opinions on grammar and punctuation are any better than her attempts at "humor". There was a great review of her book in The New Yorker:

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The first punctuation mistake in Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation ... 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. Eats, Shoots & Leaves presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it's hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.

The second paragraph goes into the punctuation error in McCourt's introduction. A fun read!

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Originally posted by dalehileman:
By chance, however, has anyone run onto "food of shame"--once again thanks all

dale, I don't want to sound impatient but the reason some of your threads go off topic is that there is simply nothing to say on topic. As I pointed out before there are only about half a dozen uses of this expression on the whole of the web. (Not counting duplicates or the urban dictionary).

There is simply no point in repeatedly asking us. This is a small community and if any of us had ever heard this expression we would have told you about it by now. All the wishful thinking in the world will not change the fact that none of us has ever heard it and, given the low number of occurences in something as vast as the internet, none of us is ever likely to hear it.

Gosh Bob, I didn't realize I was such a bad person

On another board I was taken to task, drawn and quartered, and torn 8 ways from the middle for having made the assumption that a small number of Ghits necessarily means an expr isn't in common use

Never said you were. You do sometimes seem to have a bit of a blind spot about deceased equines and the efficacy of beating them though...

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

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he plural possessive of "Spellings" I would write as "Spellingses'"

My question was, how would you write the plural possessive of Spelling? Not Spellings.

Oh, so you weren't talking about Margaret anymore. I would write the plural possessive of Spelling as Spellings'.

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Oh, so you weren't talking about Margaret anymore. I would write the plural possessive of Spelling as Spellings'.

I was talking about the word - regardless of whether it was a proper noun or not.

So what you're saying is that you would make no distinction between the singular possessive of "Spellings" and the plural possessive of "Spelling" - both being rendered as "Spellings'".

A good case for using the different formations that always prevailed when I learnt English, I would suggest.

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Gosh Bob, I didn't realize I was such a bad person

Dale, I have posted with Bob almost since the beginning of wordcraft. I can assure you that his comment was in no way meant to be derogatory. Bob was merely giving you some honest feedback. One thing I have always loved about Bob (and envied because I am probably the opposite) is his keen sense of being able to write so clearly. Bob is right that we are a small board (compared to the other you always refer to), and, as you know, many of us don't have a lot of respect for the Urban Dictionary. Anyway, I am sorry we can't help you more. Is there a slang word site maybe? That may be helpful. Or have you tried getting in touch with the editors of the Urban Dictionary?

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If she'd been named Smith it would be the Smith Report. Spellings' report or Spellings's report could also be used, depending on the style used but note in those cases you probably would not use the.

Well, then, I used it wrong. I used the apostrophe and the word the. I am sure I will hear about it as my report was written for a group where there are a couple of uptight prescriptivists. Oh well!

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How common is the term "Jimmies" for the chocolate sprinkles in cakes and ice cream?

missann, I have heard the word "jimmies" being used, but in my area the word sprinkles is much more common.

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I think those who find Truss "cranky" and "angry" may be mistaking her hyperbole, which I am reading as done for humorous effect, for vitriol. I am taking her grammatical comments seriously, but her outlandish side remarks as sheer comedy.

The bottom line is that, as with most books, some like her and some don't. Some people who read her book (zmj, Frank & I just in this thread) find her writing angry and and cranky, and therefore it probably doesn't make a lot of difference how she intended it. I was in a presentation today where the speaker went on and on about the hotel having cold water in their showers. Many people laughed at her references and took them lightheartedly. However, there were some (a couple of people at my table) who quickly got sick of her continuous references to the shower and one person described her as "agitated." I was struck by how differently people were affected by this speaker. People are different. We can never please everyone.

I'm with wordmatic on Lynne Truss. I found her amusing. That so many find her "angry and cranky" is a surprise to me. I think it is, as Kalleh suggests, just that they don't "get" her humour.

k: Good to hear from you again. Yes I agree that Bob is a fine fellow, as well as astute, pragmatic, helpful, and scholarly. I was merely fielding persiflage. And I agree most wholeheartedly that UD isn't exactly an OED

Yes, there are dozens of not hundreds of slang sites, and I use them all. However, they are much slower than UD to accept a neologism and that was the reason for my query, hoping somebody might be able to confirm its widespread usage or offer additional defs

And yes WC is smaller than other such sites and that is perhsps the reason for my poor luck in this area. However under your tutelage I am sure it will grow and perhaps some day overshadow the others

Really, not persiflage

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Originally posted by Kalleh:
Some people who read her book (zmj, Frank & I just in this thread) find her writing angry and and cranky, and therefore it probably doesn't make a lot of difference how she intended it.

I've also read "Eats shoots and leaves" and found it full of anger and contempt. This article is really contemptuous, especially when she decides to not visit a store because there's an error in the sign. On the other hand, this article is quite reasonable.

Lynn Truss was clever enough to write a perfectly ordinary grammer textbook and give it a clever name. By dint of good promotion at just the right time she had a best-seller on her hands.

I don't suppose she worries too much that some people don't like it; there are sufficient people around that do for the book to have made her into a millionaire.

And I, too, would have protestred about that egregious misspelling of "stationery". Why not? There is no excuse for such a stupid error - especially in a shop whose stock would certainly have contained several dictionaries.

It's weird that someone would decide to boycott a store because the sign had one grapheme instead of another.

I don't suppose she worries too much that some people don't like it; there are sufficient people around that do for the book to have made her into a millionaire.

You know as well as I do, Richard, that her being a millionaire no more makes her a grammarian than the amount of Budwieser sold makes it the King of Beers. I seriously doubt that Truss could write a grammar textbook, ordinary or extraordinary, given the errors she made in Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

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I seriously doubt that Truss could write a grammar textbook, ordinary or extraordinary, given the errors she made in Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Oh I don't think we can argue that she has written a grammar book - and quite a good one judged by the numbers that have read it.

That it doesn't meet the exacting demands of the grammarian purists many be true - but it is an accessable work (more so than the work of some of the grammarians whose work has also been subject to mention here) and if it thus brings home to even a small percentage of her readers the importance of grammar and spelling, that must be a good thing.

The analogy with Budweiser would be more akin to an analogy with the popularity of txt spk. Good grammar is good grammar; good beer is good beer. Budweiser, in spite of its popularity is not good beer. Lynn Truss's work, in spite of its admitted deficiencies, is an attempt to help the cause of good grammar - that could never be said of Budweiser's contribution to the cause of good beer.

It makes Lynne look very silly, when she violates the rules of the system she's trying to promote.

There's nothing wrong with text speak. It's designed for communicating over a medium where space and time is limited. Like any register, it is used in a certain social context.

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I'm with wordmatic on Lynne Truss. I found her amusing. That so many find her "angry and cranky" is a surprise to me. I think it is, as Kalleh suggests, just that they don't "get" her humour.

Arnie, that sounds a little condescending. I think we "get" the humor in the book; we just don't think it funny.

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You know as well as I do, Richard, that her being a millionaire no more makes her a grammarian than the amount of Budwieser sold makes it the King of Beers.

Excellent analogy, zmj. Just because something is popular, Richard, doesn't mean it is good. Let her have her millions, but that certainly doesn't convince me that her book is good. It has her attitude that I didn't enjoy. Others did. c'est la vie. Thank goodness we have diverse opinions or wouldn't life be boring?

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It makes Lynne look very silly, when she violates the rules of the system she's trying to promote.

I agree. Here she is boycotting stores for some of the same errors she herself makes. She strikes me as a wannabe prescriptivist.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,

I have to confess that I didn't find many errors in her book. Of course, if you write a book admonishing others' grammar then you set yourself up to be sniped at; I doubt that any single one of her alleged errors would even have been noticed had her book been about something other than language.

And, for all its alleged faults, it has done far more for the cause of good grammar than has Dudweiser for the cause of good beer.

Here's a review of Eats, Shoots and Leaves that nicely expresses the problems I have with the book.

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I've had it "up to here" with people who extrapolate from a justified scorn for the ever-present eyesore of bad writing to an apocalyptic lament that literate culture is spinning rapidly down the drain. The fact that each generation of intelligentsia — if I'm not mistaken — includes loud exponents of this viewpoint should in itself render it suspect.

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Personally, I find it implausible that email and IM are threatening to destroy conventional written discourse. It seems to me the theory behind this perception would imply, erroneously, that email and IM are cognate with older, more formal uses of writing (and could thus risk supplanting them); while the unscientifically-presented empirical basis of this paradigm here just smells to me like the latest round of scapegoating in the perennial pastime of Deploring The Poor State Of Our Young People's Writing Skills.

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Truss's sloppy thinking, unscientific methods, and irrational logic make me distrust even the portions of this book that I enjoyed, and which I would have liked to praise as authoritative and interesting.

Thanks, gooofy, for the pointer to an excellent review of that so-so book. If you remove Ms Truss' humor and solecisms, there's not much left to criticize.

Nice review, Gooofy.

I tend to write more that we have email, and I don't think it has decreased my language skills one iota; in fact, because I write more, they've probably improved.

It is interesting to see such diverse views on this book. One can see why publishers can't always predict what will sell and what won't.

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Originally posted by zmjezhd:
Thanks, gooofy, for the pointer to an excellent review of that so-so book. If you remove Ms Truss' humor and solecisms, there's not much left to criticize.

Like most similar texts, Truss's book is like 'The Curate's egg'.
The fact that it has sold well, and the fact that after nearly three years it still provokes controversy here, mean that at least it has made many people think about the diverse topics she covered. That can't be a bad thing.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: pearce,

Absolutely, Pearce. You are so correct.

One of the reasons for my more recent acting out against prescriptivism is because at my workplace there are some new people who are raving prescriptivists. One told me that you should never start a sentence with "however," which I had done. She apparently learned in high school English that "however" makes a much greater effect on the sentence when it is used like this: "Kalleh, however, disagrees with this anal prescriptivist!"

Sorry if I sometimes come across a little too acerbic about prescriptivism, but now you know why! I struggle with it on a daily basis. The problem is that some of these people are higher than I am in the hierarchy, though I still state my case, with validation (such as the Chicago Manual of Style; Language Log; other articles that we've discussed here; and of course forum questions to Wordcrafters!).