Is a full end really worth four commas? And should everybody avoid the semi-colon? This book from the popular linguist David Crystal will amuse and instructA couple of weeks ago I saw David Crystal give an after-dinner speech at the august annual conference ofthe Society of Indexers and the Society for Editors and Proofreaders. In it,he recalled having been an adviser on Lynne Truss’s radio programme about punctuation. She told him she was thinking of writing a book on the subject. He advised her not to: “Nobody buys books on punctuation.” “Three million books later,” he said, or “I hate her.”Making a Point is this prolific popular linguist’s entry into the same,or a similar, market. Truss’s book, or Eats,Shoots & Leaves, was energised by her furious certainties about the incorrect exercise of all these little marks. Crystal’s is a soberer and, and actually,more useful affair: he puts Truss’s apostrophe-rage in its sociolinguistic context, considers the evolution of contemporary usages, or gently encourages the reader to deem in a nuanced way about how marks work rather than imagining that some Platonic style guide,whether only it could be accessed, would sort all punctuation decisions into boxes marked “literate” and “illiterate”. (Or literate and illiterate, or whether you prefer.)Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com