TGIF: Grammar bullies January 23, 2009
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Fun stuff, TGIF.trackback
One of my pet peeves is people putting an apostrophe to pluralize something like CD’s or 1980′s <shudder>, but I had to chuckle at his comments about Lynne Truss, the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. I happen to like her book, and I imagine you do as well. But then again I also love The Deluxe Transitive Vampire and The New Well-Tempered Sentence by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. As translators we can’t help but become Grammar Bullies. I hope you enjoy this – and hope you can understand what the dudes in the video clip are saying, because I was totally at a loss. It’s still a cute little clip.
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Hi Jill, this is entertaining indeed. Apostrophes and English grammar in general are the subject of continuous debate on the Internet. The error that I still find the most fascinating of all is the “it’s” used as a possessive.
You and your readers of this blog may find this related link interesting:
Errors By Bloggers Kill Credibility & Traffic, Study Finds
I, too, loved Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s books and enjoyed Eats, Shoots and Leaves (which I’d never heard of until I stumbled across her doing a reading/signing in a bookstore I happened to be browsing through–there was so much laughter I had to go check out what was going on).
At the same time, I find myself thinking, “chill out! It’s just an apostrophe…” Language Log discusses this phenomenon (a type of “word rage”) now and then:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002625.html
There was another entry I can’t find now that cracked me up where they joked about Bullies going after offenders in a mediaeval lynch mob of angry villagers with torches and slavering hounds…