Word: truss
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...aside concerns about such minor matters as sex, money and career. Lynne Truss is here to help you with the really important issues--such as the proper placement of apostrophes, the six uses of the comma and the preservation of the hyphen. Truss, a British journalist and novelist, is a self-proclaimed stickler for punctuation. Not for its own sake, mind you, but because, as she writes in Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Gotham Books; 209 pages), "without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning...
...eager to keep Eats breezy, Truss writes in a tiresomely jokey style. But her book teems with amusing and appalling examples of mangled punctuation (starting with her title, which comes from a gag about a zoology entry on the panda), offers a lot of clear and helpful advice, and takes delightful detours into history. Example: her paean to Aldus Manutius the Elder, the 15th century Venetian printer who invented italics and first used the semicolon and whose babies, says Truss, she wishes she could have...
...this enough to explain Eats' astonishing six-month run atop best-seller lists in Britain and now its ascension onto several in the U.S.? Not quite. What gives the book its oomph is that behind Truss's larky manner, she's a fiery vigilante. If you can't learn the difference between the possessive its and the contraction it's, she writes, "you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave." Just kidding? Don't be too sure. --By Christopher Porterfield
...ubiquity. The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary.Simon Winchester serves up a fascinating account of the colorful cast of characters responsible for the epic compilation. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. The U.K.'s surprise best seller of the holiday season, Lynne Truss's wonderfully pedantic salvo is sure to warm the hearts of would-be copy editors everywhere. Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English. Another unapologetic linguistic curmudgeon, James Cochrane, skewers offenders who say "could of" instead of "could have" and confuse "amount" - to be used with nouns...
...love the freak show. Friday was a particularly good day for costumes, a number of which seemed more appropriate to an S&M convention. At one point a black angel was seen in discussion with two white angels on the proper construction of a truss to support the wings. The Con has a weirdly sublimated sexual atmosphere. Tight and/or revealing outfits were not uncommon for both women and men. Actually the ratio of women seemed higher than one would expect. I would guess the number at around one third. It's easy to be contemptuous of the dorky characters that...