Have You Eaten Mother?
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday July 3, 2004
Perhaps it's time to give greengrocers and signwriters a break. Dodgy punctuation is not the most heinous of crimes, writes Roslyn Guy. I confess: I am by nature a pedant. I flinch at signs that offer bargain CD's and Book's, I have been known to take my lipstick to a billboard to correct an errant apostrophe (but only under the cover of darkness and with a friend on the lookout) and I often spoil viewing for family and friends by shouting at the television if people on the small screen say they are "disinterested" when they mean "uninterested" or forgo using "me" in favour of "I", the majestic pronoun that just sounds better to so many people who must have missed school the day subjects and objects were covered. Given this, why does Lynne Truss annoy me so much? Is it perhaps envy that the British journalist has sold an amazing number of books, and made a fortune in the process, by writing about all the things I've raved about since my teens? Truss wrote Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Profile), the book about apostrophes, commas and other assorted punctuation points that has had a tenacious grip on bestseller lists all year. Who would have thought so many people would care about the rantings of a self-described "sensitive stickler"? Truss must be surprised by her book sales. In the introduction, she claims: "While we [pedants] look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified, little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else - yet we see it all the time." Now, it seems, the world does care. Or maybe buyers are enticed by the joke that gives Truss her title, the one about the panda that causes havoc because he has taken his identity from a badly punctuated entry in a wildlife manual: "Panda. Large black and white mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves." Such stories are legion. I remember the example from primary school that got us all excited about cannibalism: "Have you eaten Mother?" became a much more serious matter than the simple question about mealtime that a comma would have made it. Not only did Truss bring back memories, she got me thinking about the energy I've wasted being annoyed (and feeling rather superior, I'll admit) about minor mistakes. In the end, does it matter if a comma is omitted, as long as the meaning is clear? "Pedant" is such a nasty-sounding word and people such as Truss and the late Kingsley Amis, who seem to wear the tag as a badge of honour, so often sound smug and self-righteous that I'm trying hard these days not to yell at the television or read with a red pen in hand. I don't want to be in their club any more. It's one thing to want to use English well, to craft a beautiful sentence and to understand how words (and their little helpers, punctuation marks) work. It's quite another to become so fixated on errors that the language is in danger of becoming petrified - as in "to make rigid, stiffen, or benumb; deaden" rather than in its more common use as "paralysing with fear", which is how Truss claims to feel about phrases like "potatoe's for sale". A quick look at the history of English is enough to remind us that we speak, read and write a living language. Melvyn Bragg, Bill Bryson and Kate Burridge have all written with verve and intelligence about what Bragg calls The Adventure of English (Hodder & Stoughton). There's a common theme in their work - the way words and the structure of language have altered to reflect the changes in people's lives over the centuries. It is this shift that makes acceptable things once frowned on such as using "terrific" to mean "wonderful" rather than "terrible". It has allowed new words and new spelling (such as "musick" losing its final letter). And it has given birth to text-messaging, a development I can't yet warm to, despite my pledge to give up pedantry. In his book, which is subtitled "The Biography of a Language", Bragg takes us on a fascinating journey from AD500 to 2000 as English adapted to invaders, intellectuals and the internet. People have found themselves judged by their use of words, their grammar and their accents, in much the same way pedants today judge people by their poor punctuation skills. The need to conform to the standards of the day often caused shame, where there should have been room for pride. Bragg recalls his own boyhood in Cumbria in England's north-west: "When we said 'blud' for 'blood' and 'grun' for 'ground', we were way nearer Old than BBC English. No one told us that in the 1940s and 1950s. Had they done so we might have been proud that our way of speaking was in direct descent from the great warrior founding tribes of our language 11/2 millennia ago. It might have done us good." The desire for order has been a constant in the history of English. And it wasn't always for noble reasons. Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels, feared not being understood by future generations and so, to ensure his own place in literary history, he agitated for an academy, like that of the French, to "fix" the language as it was. In Mother Tongue (Penguin), Bryson is clear about the dangers of conformity. He takes to task those who consider Creole languages inferior to standard English and warns against the dangers of putting oneself forward as an authority on the written word: "Spellings in English are so treacherous and the opportunities for flummoxing so abundant, that the authorities themselves sometimes stumble." This leads Bryson to provide a list of errors that makes Truss's list look like small potatoes (no apostrophe needed), before concluding that, as English is a "fluid and democratic language", such nit-picking is a waste of time. Given the innumerable misuses Truss and others have catalogued, it may be time for a change to the rule about apostrophes, to abandon their use as signals of possession and keep them to indicate that letters have been omitted. This idea is canvassed by Burridge in Blooming English (ABC Books), a delightfully chatty book based on her regular radio spots. Burridge doesn't offer the suggestion lightly; when she mentioned it on radio, "the hate mail flooded in". She says the problem Truss cites as a modern epidemic is far from new - there were huge problems in the 18th century when people sprinkled their words liberally with the raised comma, even going so far as to spell has as "ha's" in the mistaken belief that it was short for haves. This makes banana's and all the other so-called greengrocer's apostrophes look almost acceptable. "What we have is a saga of confusion, inconsistency, flux and wild imagination, ever since the apostrophe made its appearance in the 16th century. Small wonder people today are unsure about when and where to place the apostrophe," she observes. Even Don Watson, whose book Death Sentence (Random House) comes out of his despair at the way our language has been taken hostage by the spruikers of jargon, is willing to tolerate errant apostrophes: "It is not as if language was ever fixed or even logical." He is much more concerned about the loss of "meaning, energy, imagery and rhythm" to an ugly form of public language, inspired by marketing and managerialism. Phrases such as "identifying core issues" , "adopting strategic models" and reaching "favourable outcomes" deaden the language even when the punctuation is right. Watson begs people to rebel against such gobbledegook. "Clear, precise, active language is good for democracy and for society", he writes. I'd add that it's also good for the soul. It could be argued that language-watchers and linguists are too far ahead of the rest of the population in accepting the evolution of a living language. For a realistic appraisal of the rules that should apply, we have style guides, those intimidating and exhaustive tomes that are meant to steer academics, public servants and journalists through the minefield of written English. Of course, style guides are not composed with divine inspiration so it wouldn't do to rely on their infallibility, but I admit to the teeniest bit of malicious mirth in reporting that neither can Truss and the Apostrophe Protection Society rely on their support. Truss's attention-grabbing protest about lost apostrophes was centred on last year's release of the American film Two Weeks Notice. Incensed by promotions for this film on posters "slung all along the side of buses in letters four feet tall, with no apostrophe", she organised her own protest. Truss was photographed picketing cinemas, carrying a placard with the lost apostrophe on it. But, and this is where life gets tricky for sticklers, it is far from universally agreed that there should be an apostrophe in Two Weeks Notice. Pam Peters says in the new language bible published last month, The Cambridge Guide to English Usage: "Apostrophes are now not obligatory in a number of kinds of expressions. They include ... plural expressions of time and space, such as 'five weeks leave.' " The idea is that the expression of time works as an adjective rather than as an indication of possession. That Truss based her "save the apostrophe" campaign on a contentious example was enough to make me doubt her whole thesis. I didn't bother too much about examining all her other claims. Thankfully people like Louis Menand are more diligent about these things than I am. The Harvard professor and critic for The New Yorker, who reviewed her book in that esteemed journal last week, has done a demolition job on Truss. Menand was so incensed by Truss's audacity in assuming British English set the standard for the language and that she was in a position to preach about this standard, that he went through her book with the proverbial fine-tooth comb and found it littered with errors. She misuses commas, semicolons, parentheses, the lot. But only some of the time. Other times, she shows she does know the rules after all. In Menand's words: "The most objectionable thing about Truss's writing is its inconsistency." Yes, English is a tricky language and more serious people than Truss have made determined attempts to tame it. In The King's English (HarperCollins), Kingsley Amis, the late British novelist and critic, doesn't deal with the "two weeks notice" problem but his comments on apostrophes, and language in general, are of the traditional variety that should please Truss. Not that this will necessarily win him too many other fans. Much of what he says is useful and interesting but he adopts such a superior tone that only the converted would want to stick with him. How about this little gem: "I have seen an illiterate apostrophe even in the impeccably middle-class setting of a dentist's waiting-room." Ah, such joy - punctuation can break through class barriers, even if Amis can't. And the title of his introduction - "Apologia Pro Vita Sua Academia" (is anything more pretentious than the gratuitous use of Latin?) - is enough to make a normal person embrace texting and write "i cldnt bleve wot i was cing." Latin indeed! Amis follows his unexplained nod to Cardinal John Newman, who had more reason to write in Latin, with this: "My interest in words as part of language preceded their appeal to me as units of literature of any sort, and I was learning to spell some individual words before I knew what they meant. Ever since, I have retained what I like to think of as a special feeling for language in spoken as well as written form." (I think that means: "I was a precocious kid who loved words; still do.") Is this what we should aim for? Careful, nay stodgy, English so bound up in rules that the life has been squeezed out of it? Give me Melvyn Bragg's take on language any time: "It is about the words which describe the way we live, the words we think in, sing in, speak in; the words which nourish our imagination, words which tell us what we are." And if there's a misplaced apostrophe or two along the way, so be it.
© 2004 Sydney Morning Herald
