{"id":37,"date":"2006-05-18T11:15:35","date_gmt":"2006-05-18T10:15:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/?p=37"},"modified":"2010-09-19T10:33:28","modified_gmt":"2010-09-19T16:33:28","slug":"i-hate-lynn-truss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/i-hate-lynn-truss\/","title":{"rendered":"I Hate Lynne Truss"},"content":{"rendered":"

My wife is the Events Coordinator<\/em> for the Parents’ Association of our childrens’ school.\u00c2\u00a0 This means that I’m effectively involved too, doing anything that involves touching a PC instead of the ‘phone.\u00c2\u00a0 This week I had to\u00c2\u00a0deisgn and print some tickets for their Summer Ball.\u00c2\u00a0 Being short on both time and patience (and unpaid) I cut\/pasted\u00c2\u00a0the text from somewhere else, threw in some\u00c2\u00a0clipart, and hit Print.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately\u00c2\u00a0I committed the cardinal sin of not proofreading, and the tickets went out on general release with the title “Parent’s Association Summer Ball”.\u00c2\u00a0[*] (For the less-eagle-eyed, the apostrophe is\u00c2\u00a0in the wrong place – it should be “Parents’…”.)\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 This is embarrassing from a professional writer, but it used to be that\u00c2\u00a0I could have gotten away with it.\u00c2\u00a0 Most people\u00c2\u00a0wouldn’t\u00c2\u00a0even notice, and those that did probably wouldn’t care (let’s not forget, this is a local, home-grown event, and the tickets are disposable, not family heirlooms…).<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, Lynn Truss, with her\u00c2\u00a0[excellent] book Eats, Shoots & Leaves<\/em>, has turned half the world (or at\u00c2\u00a0least\u00c2\u00a0the 10 million or so who read the book) into Punctuation Nazis.\u00c2\u00a0 Consequently\u00c2\u00a0my wife handed out the tickets only to\u00c2\u00a0find herself\u00c2\u00a0harangued by some two-bit soccer mom who clearly has nothing better to do in-between running little Tarquin to violin lessons than to scour the work of volunteers with a magnifying glass looking for something to bitch about.\u00c2\u00a0 I wouldn’t have cared if she’d had a go at me<\/span>.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m a regular Master of Quick Wit and Ready Repartee when it comes to\u00c2\u00a0a withering retort.\u00c2\u00a0 But my wife is ill-equipped to defend herself, barely knowing an ellipsis from a parenthesis\u00c2\u00a0when it comes to punctuation.\u00c2\u00a0 Which means that I<\/em> get it in the neck twice when I get home – once for getting it wrong in the first place, and once for making her look stupid for not knowing her possessive plurals…<\/p>\n

So thanks, Lynn.\u00c2\u00a0 Punctuation used to be a nice, esoteric world that only we professional writers understood.\u00c2\u00a0 We could sneer at the mistakes of others, safe in the knowledge that no-one outside our own clique would notice our own mistakes. It was fun.\u00c2\u00a0 But now that you’ve made everyone an ‘expert’, it has taken the fun out of the whole thing.\u00c2\u00a0 Now I’ll have to go and find something else to feel superior about.<\/p>\n

[*] Before anyone else starts on me, I know that convention used<\/span> to be to put the full stop (period) inside the quotation marks, but modern usage now places it outside<\/span>.<\/p>\n

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My wife is the Events Coordinator for the Parents’ Association of our childrens’ school.\u00c2\u00a0 This means that I’m effectively involved too, doing anything […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[44],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions\/267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.planetmanuel.com\/dirk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}