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Point Blank

Geoffrey Nunberg

"Fresh Air" commentary, Feb. 1, 2005

The author photo inside the cover of Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves shows Truss with a marker poised to insert a missing apostrophe on a poster for the movie Two Weeks Notice, an allusion to her proposal to form vigilante groups who will venture out in ski masks in the dead of night correcting the punctuation on signs and billboards. Like other pop grammarians, she's always addressing her audience as a tiny band of beleaguered partisans who stand between the language and out-and-out barbarism. As in "How long before the last few punctuation sticklers are obliged to take refuge together in caves?"
 
Actually, she'd better change that "caves" to "caverns," if she's planning to accommodate all the people who have bought her book. Almost a year after its American publication, it's still perched near the top of the bestseller lists, even as more recent books by Bill Clinton and David Sedaris have receded from the ranks. In fact for all their talk of beleaguered minorites, writers like Truss, John Simon, and Edwin Newman have turned sticklerism into a popular entertainment that appeals to a far wider audience than an old-fashioned high-culture grammarian like H. W. Fowler could ever have dreamed of.

True, most of Truss's readers aren't dyed-in-the-wool grammar buffs -- the sorts of people who correct the spelling on restaurant menus and begin their sentences by saying "I pride myself." They simply enjoy a lively rant, particularly if it flatters their taste in the bargain.

And a lively rant is what Truss gives them -- garrulous, rambling, and brimming with melodramatic outrage. To hear her tell it, not a day goes by that a faulty punctuation mark doesn't leave her appalled, gasping, shuddering, gazing in horror, or stopping dead in her tracks with her fingers in her mouth.

That's all deliberately over the top, of course. Anybody who was actually walking around in state of shock and outrage over the punctuation of email messages and movie posters would have serious priority issues.  But if you camp up your pedantry broadly, nobody can accuse you of taking yourself too seriously.

In fact Truss's book bears a resemblance to another surprise cultural phenomenon, "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." Those fantasies about forming a militia of commahadeen bring to mind the "Queer Eye" SWAT team swooping in after dark to replace somebody's tacky shower curtain. And those operatic denunciations of punctuation errors are what you'd expect from the "Queer Eye" bunch if they added a grammar makeover specialist: "Oh... My... God -- Did you hear that pronoun?"

But in a postmodern world, mocking your foibles also is a way of giving yourself license to indulge them -- you think of karaoke singers who clown and mug as they sing songs by the Carpenters that they're embarrassed to admit they actually cherish. And for pop grammarians like Truss, you can't help feeling that the self-mockery is a cover for self-congratulation. She may make fun of herself as a stickler, but she clearly considers herself as one of an elect -- someone whose sleep is troubled by a misplaced apostrophe even if it's twenty mattresses down.

That's where the resemblance to "Queer Eye" breaks down. As Susan Sontag pointed out 40 years ago in a famous essay, true camp is always infused with generosity, even when it affects a malicious tone -- it's about relishing, not judging. Hence the crucial last scene of every "Queer Eye" episode, where the team is shown chatting fondly about the zhlubby straight guy they've turned into a swan.

But for all her energetic jollity, generosity isn't Truss's strength. She launches into arias of indignation over what most people would consider pretty venial offenses, like superfluous apostrophes in a pizza ad, the name of a pop group, or a sign over the vegetable bin. H. W. Fowler would have cut people a bit more slack. The English language isn't going to stand or fall on the strength its supermarket signage.

True, most readers find Truss's orthographic snobbery merely amusing. After all, the apostrophe is a pretty slender hook to hang your self-esteem on. But the book has come in for rough treatment by reviewers like Louis Menand in the New Yorker and Edmund Morris in The New York Times --  writers that you wouldn't ordinarily expect to bother with a book like this at all.

That may be because they see Truss's book as trivializing a subject that they take very seriously. When we turn punctuation into an occasion for feeling superior to the local tradesmen, we're letting ourselves off too easily. Anyone can master the simple rituals of the apostrophe, but it's a more humbling exercise to confront the austere disciplines of the colon, dash, and semicolon. And for all her self-assurance, Truss doesn't show much sign of having grappled with those mysteries. In fact her own writing is punctuated with alarming insouciance. She tosses semicolons into her sentences in something like the way I scatter fennel seed when I'm cooking, in the vague hope it will somehow pull the other ingredients together.[1]  The difference is that no publisher would let me get anywhere near a cookbook.


NOTES

1. "A fine sense for the semicolon... seems anything but common," Henry James once remarked, and Truss manages to illustrate most of the pitfalls that await the writer who tries to get fancy with the mark. Striking a Chekovian note, she writes:

I saw a sign for "Book's" with an apostrophe in it, and something deep inside me snapped; snapped with that melancholy sound you hear in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, like a far-off cable breaking in a mine-shaft." (p. 183)

But semicolons are never used in modern English to set off adjuncts like appositives, relative clauses, or subordinate clauses. True, some 19th-century writers used semicolons that way, provided the adjunct was in sentence-final position:
Adrian gave Sir Austin an able version of his son's behaviour and adventures; dwelling upon this sudden taciturnity when he heard of his father's resolution not to see him.  (George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel)

His good looks and his rank had one fair claim on his attachment; since to them he must have owed a wife of very superior character to any thing deserved by his own.  (Jane Austen, Persuasion)

Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed. (Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol")

But that rule has been obsolete for nearly a century (not even Fowler used semicolons in this way), and to drop one of those semicolons into a modern text is akin to inserting a comma before a dash -- a 19th-century practice that you assume not even Truss would permit herself. File this one under "bungled elegance" -- really just a high-fallutin version of the same urge that led someone to insert the apostrophe in "Book's" that Truss is so indignant over.

Elsewhere, Truss writes:

Our punctuation exists as a printed set of conventions; it has evolved slowly because of printing's innate conservatism; and is effective only if readers have been trained to appreciate the nuances of the printed page. (p. 178)

The semicolons here are supposed to be doing the work of separating sentences in series, except that the third conjunct (the one beginning "and is effective") is not a sentence, but a verb-phrase. So the real structure of the sentence is:

[Our punctuation exists as a printed set of conventions; [it has evolved slowly because of printing's innate conservatism ; and is effective only if readers have been trained to appreciate the nuances of the printed page.]]

As a result, the sentence is doubly incorrect: it uses a semicolon to conjoin two verb-phrases, which is a no-no, and it permits the first semicolon to scope (that is, to be syntactically "higher than") the second, which semicolons cannot do. Compare:

The government has raised taxes; it has made war; and ignored the people.

Then there are places where Truss's enthusiasm for the semicolon leads her to the punctuational equivalent of vers libre:

Sometimes -- and I've never admitted this to anyone before - I adopt a kind of stream-of-consciousness sentence structure; somewhat like Virginia Woolf, without full sentences; but it feels OK to do this; rather worrying. (p. 126)

Streaming or no, Virginia Woolf's consciousness always laid itself out grammatically; you can search her prose in vain for anything as louche as this. True, Truss is as free as anyone to proclaim that her self-expression is not to be trammeled by mere convention, but when we find a sentence like this one in a book that bears the subtitle "The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" -- well, "rather worrying" seems just about right.







Copyright © 2005 Geoffrey Nunberg All rights reserved.