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.
Musings from an overworked translator 
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…