One of my odd hobbies is picking up grammar advice books and seeing how long it takes me to get angry.

This book didn’t bring me to towering heights of rage.  In fact, in my skimming, the advice all seemed pretty solid and, more importantly, advice i agreed with.  The only thing that bothered me was the “devotional” format.  It’s a cute idea — a different bit of grammar advice for every day of the week.  But, personally, i’d rather my grammar advice be sensibly organized rather than presented in a quasi-religious format.

Not something i’ll be buying for my collection, but not bad to flip thru’.

Perhaps if i hadn’t missed my copy editing class on wednesday (thanks to some salsa bent on homicidal revenge), i would have realized that march 4th was National Grammar Day.  I would have at least liked the opportunity to rant about it, tho’ Arnold Zwicky did an excellent job last year.  I especially like this bit:

Finally, a point that has come up in informal discussions at Stanford about the regulation of language.  Paul Kiparsky has noted on several occasions that while in some European countries the prescribing of language forms for certain public purposes is the job of official bodies, which normally include language scholars (as well as literary figures), this sort of regulation has been PRIVATIZED in English-speaking countries: it’s managed by commercial publishers, newspaper and magazine editors, and a whole industry of free-lance advisers, only a few of whom know much about either the nature of language or the structure and history of English.  Such an arrangement resonates with American free-enterprise ideals and also with the widespread American disdain for “experts” and “intellectuals”.

In a different vein, here’s an amusing 4-part noir pastiche by John McIntyre, “mild-mannered copy editor for [...] The Baltimore Sun.”  One of my favorite phrases is “the bottom fell out of the paragraph game” (from part 1).  Yeah, that’s what happened to my 1st zine — just another victim when the bottom fell out.

1. Down those mean sentences I walk alone:  “I was sitting at my desk in the old Intelligencer-Argus building the day she walked in. It was late afternoon on a rainy day, and my hand had strayed more than once toward the dictionary in the bottom desk drawer. I heard footsteps approaching, and when I looked up, there she was. She was — lissome.”
2. “What are we going to do now?” she asked: “I reached for his collar and pulled him upright in his chair. An Eberhard Faber Col-erase number 1277 pencil, carmine red, protruded from his chest, just over the heart.”
3. The Fat Man chuckles: “I’d known him for years. We’d been honor students together — teacher’s pets — and then he started his slide. It began innocently enough, with a little amateur lexicography. But then he fell in with that hard set at Language Log. He was pals with both the Geoffs — Pullum and Nunberg — Arnold Zwicky, the lot. Before you could say lexeme, he was too deep into descriptivism to ever come back. But, maybe because of our old school ties, we had always managed a gingerly balance.”
4. The rule you don’t break: “I was pensive on the drive back to the Brockenbrough bungalow. Editing’s a mug’s game. The words strain and crack; sometimes they break under the burden, the tension. They slip and slide and perish — won’t stay still. You go out on a raid on the inarticulate, and not everybody comes back. The public doesn’t like to see it but wants it done. That leaves it to me.”

Perhaps ironically, for a hardcore descriptivist such as myself, i did spend wednesday morning proofreading.