4/17/2024 0 Comments Fragment sentence peril meaningIn short, says Truss, “we are unattractive know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families.” (pg. It’s a very patient friend who doesn’t push you off the jetty when you point out, hopping and spitting, that “Ferry Terminal’s This Way” is an abomination. Not everyone wants to know that the restaurant you’re walking past shouldn’t have put their “Childrens menu” in the window without the apostrophe. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we see dead punctuation. ![]() While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on, blind to our plight. Part of one’s despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. Here’s the sad reality: no-one seems to care about the steady decline in proper grammar and punctuation usage, except for us sticklers. Thank you for that comprehensive and vaguely patronising missive on the redundancy of my profession and the ultimate futility of my efforts to preserve and promote the proper use of our language, I’ll say. Who cares if you occasionally confuse “they’re” and “their”? What do you mean, it’s a dangling modifier? Are you some sort of freak? Look, they’ll say, as long as you’re understood, it doesn’t matter if you get the apostrophe in the wrong place, or write exclusively in sentence fragments. ![]() I’m convinced that a number of my friends and acquaintances chat in low, concerned voices behind my back about my Grammar Nazi tendencies, and how it’s all just a bit OTT and unnecessary. What do I get? Strange looks, eye rolls and exasperated sighs. I suspect the majority of the nation would nod along with him and echo his every expletive. Who’s selecting the All Blacks in this country?” My partner’s just as bad when he watches the rugby. I swipe through the online papers in the morning, hissing increasingly infuriated objections: “No apostrophe! Comma splice! Singular possessive, for God’s sake! It’s your, not you’re! Who’s training the journalists in this country?” And the way I wince when I pass a sign for “tomato’s”, “carrot’s”, “CD’s” or “video’s” – what Truss delightfully refers to as a “satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes.” (pg. Then there’s my tendency to hover near the desks of report-writing colleagues, red pen twitching. ![]() My profession-proofreader, editor and writer-is just a tiny giveaway, for a start. “Sticklers Unite!” is the rallying cry from Lynne Truss in her #1 New York Times bestseller for grammar nerds, Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.
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