The comma, a curved finger that both beckons and halts
- The semicolon, mannered, foppish, sincere
- The colon, officious, waxed, but willing to negotiate—as long as standards are obeyed
- The apostrophe is utterly offhand, but trustworthy
- The parenthesis (sturdy, a bit dull)
More here. Thanks, Tom Bentley.
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Heresy!
This is a short book, but it is as dense as a diamond. It is as tragic as a Spanish pieta, but it is completely heretical.
So says The Irish Times about Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary.
I’ll be spreading this love on World Book Night
And Esperanza promises that when she escapes from Mango Street, she’ll be back to help the ones who can’t.
2013 award for excellence in indexing
The American Society for Indexing has awarded the 2013 H.W. Wilson Award to a long-time friend and colleague, Kate Mertes.
Kate’s winning index is to Montesquieu’s My Thoughts (Mes Pensées) , published by the Liberty Fund. The Wilson Award Committee has also commended the publisher for enhancing the usability of Kate’s complex index with an elegant design and layout. I cannot wait to see it!
Until his death in 1755, Montesquieu maintained notebooks in which he wrote ideas on a wide variety of topics. Montesquieu called these notebooks, Mes Pensées. They appear in English for the first time in this edition.
The grocer’s apostrophe: a weeping pustule on the shining face of English?
English usage and grammar is a hot mess, to be frank: rules that contradict hundreds of years of use appear out of nowhere and for no discernible reason; spelling is off the hook; and even when something is nice and tidy (“sneak” entered English in 1594 and its past tense was “sneaked”) we complicate it needlessly (“snuck” showed up in the 1800s for no good reason and is now considered a standard past tense of “sneak” in the US). The reality is that many of the bits of grammar that we think of as wrong are actually just a matter of preference.
Thanks for that, Kory Stamper, and Happy Grammar Day!
On vacation until March 15
From January 28 until March 15, I will be out of the country with limited access to phone and e-mail. During that time please get in touch with Lisa DeBoer at deboer18@gmail.com. She will be minding the shop for Colleen Dunham Indexing and will be able to track me down if necessary.
When it’s twanging
From Kurt’s letters: When I get home, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and water.
"That's all right. I like to have my heart broken."