Grammatical deaths
Grammatical deaths
Posted 11:48pm (Mla time) Feb 02, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the February 3, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
I GOT the book last year from a friend, Vic Magdaraog, who sent it to me to help me recuperate from an operation. He thought I was still confined at St. Luke's after my doctor, and friend, Jiji Sison, took out my gall bladder. I wasn't. I was there for only three nights, I was anxious to get home, and did. But the book did help in my swift recovery at home, though it caused me no small amount of discomfiture chuckling out loud while the wound underneath my ribs, hidden by the sewn skin in that part of my body, healed.
The book is Lynne Truss' "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," which has the distinction of being the first book on punctuation to become a runaway bestseller in the British charts. Its success has little to do with British eccentricity-unless the eccentricity lies in their still reading books, a dying art across the globe-the book is just, well, delightful, to use a British word. It amuses while it enlightens.
The title comes from this story: "A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. 'Why?' asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. 'I'm a panda,' he says, at the door. 'Look it up.' The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
Strangely enough, some people I've shown this book to, or told the story to with the appropriate pauses, couldn't get the joke. I should have known that in a country that doesn't particularly care for grammar, and in an age that doesn't particularly pay heed to punctuation, it's not unusual for its point to be lost. I myself won't bother to explain it. Go figure.
Punctuation is important, Truss says, and she spends the rest of her book showing why in often hilarious ways. One of the things she upbraids is the title of the movie, "Two Weeks Notice." It's a title that can truly raise the hackles not just of sub-editors or copyreaders but also of anyone professing to be literate. Or don't you notice anything wrong with it? The correct phrase, of course, is "Two Weeks' Notice" -- apostrophe after "weeks." You wonder why none of its stars (Sandra Bullock, Hugh Grant) director (Marc Lawrence, also its writer), and staff from Warner Bros ever noticed the atrocity. The title, splashed on posters of the movie, went on to conquer the world.
Punctuation, Truss quotes a newspaper as saying, "is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling." It's good manners, it's considerateness. If you don't punctuate your statements right, you make readers work harder. Or worse, you give them the wrong meanings. As this example shows: "A woman, without her man, is nothing." When you probably mean: "A woman: without her, man is nothing."
My sympathies are entirely with Truss not only because I edit or copy-read publications to supplement income and have seen first-hand the dramatic plunge in grammatical, not to speak of punctuation-al, IQ in these parts. I sympathize with her because I do know that these times are not hospitable to displays of this intelligence or politeness. Truss mentions the ravages on language brought about by the Internet, specifically the e-mail, and text-message sending via the cellular phone. I agree. That, too, I've seen firsthand: the dumbing of communication brought about by text messaging in particular.
I was one of those who resisted the cellular phone for a time, but gave in eventually. And discovered its many wonders in time. Truly, it does make it easier to meet-it's especially useful for me since I take the Metro Rail Transit to Makati City; I just refuse to drive all the way there. I was about to say it makes it easier as well to keep track of your kids but don't you notice that your kids' -- notably the teenage variety's -- cell phones always experience low bat whenever you're inquiring into their whereabouts at odd hours? But that's another story.
But text messaging has its drawbacks, for me too in particular. Which is that it has been encroaching into my writing, and threatening to overrun it. I used to write straight sentences, with the correct spelling and punctuation, in my text messages. But I've since found out that that takes time (I won't win any contest in rapid "texting") and occupies several pages. As with owning a cellular phone, I've given in to expedience too and begun "texting" the conventional way, which is in open defiance of grammatical convention.
I haven't gotten as far as writing "ba2", which was how our teenager made life miserable for me one time I was supposed to meet him in a building-it turned out his cryptic message meant "baba," or downstairs; I thought it was the name of a shop-but I have gotten as far as removing all vestiges of articles ("the" and "a" or "an"), obliterating vowels in words, erasing capital letters, and producing slabs of text without -- my monumental apologies to Ms Truss -- commas and periods. Indeed, on the whole talking like Johnny Weissmuller-"Me Tarzan, you Jane," or in "textese," "m trzn u jan"). I know it's horrible, and produces the nastier effect of making you tone deaf. Words are about rhythm and beat and cadence too, and those things evaporate in text messages.
I'm really hoping they get around to making cell phones, and PC's (note the apostrophe after "C"), receptive to verbal commands so we can stop using the keyboard to inflict more torture on language. Meanwhile, I guess I'll just have to sign up with the resistance Truss offers to lead to preserve the beauty, or integrity, of one of humankind's noblest inventions.
Till then, c u.
Posted 11:48pm (Mla time) Feb 02, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the February 3, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
I GOT the book last year from a friend, Vic Magdaraog, who sent it to me to help me recuperate from an operation. He thought I was still confined at St. Luke's after my doctor, and friend, Jiji Sison, took out my gall bladder. I wasn't. I was there for only three nights, I was anxious to get home, and did. But the book did help in my swift recovery at home, though it caused me no small amount of discomfiture chuckling out loud while the wound underneath my ribs, hidden by the sewn skin in that part of my body, healed.
The book is Lynne Truss' "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," which has the distinction of being the first book on punctuation to become a runaway bestseller in the British charts. Its success has little to do with British eccentricity-unless the eccentricity lies in their still reading books, a dying art across the globe-the book is just, well, delightful, to use a British word. It amuses while it enlightens.
The title comes from this story: "A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. 'Why?' asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. 'I'm a panda,' he says, at the door. 'Look it up.' The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
Strangely enough, some people I've shown this book to, or told the story to with the appropriate pauses, couldn't get the joke. I should have known that in a country that doesn't particularly care for grammar, and in an age that doesn't particularly pay heed to punctuation, it's not unusual for its point to be lost. I myself won't bother to explain it. Go figure.
Punctuation is important, Truss says, and she spends the rest of her book showing why in often hilarious ways. One of the things she upbraids is the title of the movie, "Two Weeks Notice." It's a title that can truly raise the hackles not just of sub-editors or copyreaders but also of anyone professing to be literate. Or don't you notice anything wrong with it? The correct phrase, of course, is "Two Weeks' Notice" -- apostrophe after "weeks." You wonder why none of its stars (Sandra Bullock, Hugh Grant) director (Marc Lawrence, also its writer), and staff from Warner Bros ever noticed the atrocity. The title, splashed on posters of the movie, went on to conquer the world.
Punctuation, Truss quotes a newspaper as saying, "is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling." It's good manners, it's considerateness. If you don't punctuate your statements right, you make readers work harder. Or worse, you give them the wrong meanings. As this example shows: "A woman, without her man, is nothing." When you probably mean: "A woman: without her, man is nothing."
My sympathies are entirely with Truss not only because I edit or copy-read publications to supplement income and have seen first-hand the dramatic plunge in grammatical, not to speak of punctuation-al, IQ in these parts. I sympathize with her because I do know that these times are not hospitable to displays of this intelligence or politeness. Truss mentions the ravages on language brought about by the Internet, specifically the e-mail, and text-message sending via the cellular phone. I agree. That, too, I've seen firsthand: the dumbing of communication brought about by text messaging in particular.
I was one of those who resisted the cellular phone for a time, but gave in eventually. And discovered its many wonders in time. Truly, it does make it easier to meet-it's especially useful for me since I take the Metro Rail Transit to Makati City; I just refuse to drive all the way there. I was about to say it makes it easier as well to keep track of your kids but don't you notice that your kids' -- notably the teenage variety's -- cell phones always experience low bat whenever you're inquiring into their whereabouts at odd hours? But that's another story.
But text messaging has its drawbacks, for me too in particular. Which is that it has been encroaching into my writing, and threatening to overrun it. I used to write straight sentences, with the correct spelling and punctuation, in my text messages. But I've since found out that that takes time (I won't win any contest in rapid "texting") and occupies several pages. As with owning a cellular phone, I've given in to expedience too and begun "texting" the conventional way, which is in open defiance of grammatical convention.
I haven't gotten as far as writing "ba2", which was how our teenager made life miserable for me one time I was supposed to meet him in a building-it turned out his cryptic message meant "baba," or downstairs; I thought it was the name of a shop-but I have gotten as far as removing all vestiges of articles ("the" and "a" or "an"), obliterating vowels in words, erasing capital letters, and producing slabs of text without -- my monumental apologies to Ms Truss -- commas and periods. Indeed, on the whole talking like Johnny Weissmuller-"Me Tarzan, you Jane," or in "textese," "m trzn u jan"). I know it's horrible, and produces the nastier effect of making you tone deaf. Words are about rhythm and beat and cadence too, and those things evaporate in text messages.
I'm really hoping they get around to making cell phones, and PC's (note the apostrophe after "C"), receptive to verbal commands so we can stop using the keyboard to inflict more torture on language. Meanwhile, I guess I'll just have to sign up with the resistance Truss offers to lead to preserve the beauty, or integrity, of one of humankind's noblest inventions.
Till then, c u.
posted by Dante at 12:00 AM
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