Jan 05 2012
Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Jan 3
Posted by The Gneech
This year my desk calendar is taking a break from the Forgotten English and is instead epigrams from Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Periodically, when there’s a particularly good one, I shall repost them here. For instance, this past Tuesday’s…
While significant variations exist between British and American usage, these are matters for quite rarefied concern. You say “parentheses” while we say “brackets” … but to people who call an apostrophe “one of them floating comma things” it just doesn’t matter very much.
–Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves-The Gneech
5 responses to “Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Jan 3”
I love her books. Funny but never condescending.
I love the idea of guerrilla punctuation! :D
Epithet? Why, surely you mean excerpt, old boy!
An epithet is an addition to a name, such as “the Great” in “Alexander the Great”. It’s also sometimes used as a synonym for slur.
Since your post was about a book expounding the importance of proper English, I figured a correction was justified.
Actually, I meant “epigram.” XD
Ah, yes, that works, too.
“Epithet” probably stuck out to me because Paul and Storm (pleeeeeeease tell me you know who they are) misused it in a brilliant parody of Schoolhouse Rock’s “Interjections”, using “epithets” when they means “expletives”. I wouldn’t say the song is ruined for me, exactly, but, oh, if only they’d gotten it right…