“I have an irrational fear of commas,” he said, and I smiled.
It doesn’t seem so strange to me, the poor old little comma. I have used it and abused it much over the years. And as a former English teacher, I have a better idea than most ordinary folk about when to stick it in or leave it out.
Besides, fear of making a few mistakes here and there is not going to get in the way of pursuing my goal of mastery as a writer. There really is no choice but to embrace fear of failure, and plod on. Or plot on (joke)… (groan, I know).
Yet I’m one of those peculiar people that takes great delight in playing with the rules of grammar and punctuation a little bit. That’s because I knew them once, the rules.
A great education instilled me with the confidence to write at length, in complex clauses and elaborate prose; to throw colons and semi-colons around at will, with shameless disregard for the reader’s concern.
It seems I’m not the only one with a deeper interest in the subject of grammar and punctuation. In 2004, a little book on the rules of punctuation in English became a surprise New York Times bestseller. I read it and enjoyed it too. Though it hardly ranks as a classic on my shelf.
By the end of the year, I’d seen a thousand unloved copies in secondhand stores. Lynne Truss’s sudden rise to popularity shrank without trace–a cautionary tale for aspiring authors in their choice of topic, perhaps.
Before you get me wrong, I have to say that one thing troubles me about the premise of Truss’s book: linguistic purism.
There are people who seem to think that our language should be defended and protected from all change. It seems strange to me because our language has been changing and evolving for thousands of years. There are no rules, only a bunch of mutually-upheld conventions.
Great writers have been challenging these conventions for years. Making language fresh; making us, as users, think about our words, our sentences. A subtle revolution–but what can be more dangerous and subversive than our words?
When Cummings abandoned capital letters in his work, did the world fall apart? I think not. And yet we’re still asking these questions of ourselves today. I agree that total abandon would not be desired but it’s good to challenge our assumptions and the received wisdom at times.
Though I’m with GrammarBlog on the assertion that people who don’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re” should be strung up by the gonads.
So whilst I’m playing around with my developing thoughts on the merits of capital letters over sentence case in my post titles, and considering whether to use full-stops too, please bear with me and accept that I’m a little apples-and-pears in my approach.
I call artistic license in this case. What’s your excuse?
