Eats, Shoots and Leaves by Lynne Truss

Author:Lynne Truss [Truss, Lynne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humor, Reference, General, Usenet, C429, Kat, Exratorrents
ISBN: 9780007431595
Google: VHO1kSJK1JcC
Publisher: Harpercollins Uk
Published: 2011-05-26T17:20:08+00:00

Look at that sentence fly. Amazing. The way it stays up like that. Would anyone mind if I ate the last sandwich?

Of course, nothing is straightforward in the world of literary taste. Just as there are writers who worship the semicolon, there are other high stylists who dismiss it – who label it, if you please, middle-class. James Joyce preferred the colon, as more authentically classical; P. G. Wodehouse did an effortlessly marvellous job without it; George Orwell tried to avoid the semicolon completely in Coming Up for Air (1939), telling his editor in 1947, "I had decided about this time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one." Martin Amis included just one semicolon in Money (1984), and was afterwards (more than usually) pleased with himself. The American writer Donald Barthelme wrote that the semicolon is "ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog's belly". Fay Weldon says she positively dislikes semicolons, "which is odd, because I don't dislike anybody really". Meanwhile, that energetic enemy to all punctuation Gertrude Stein (remember she said the comma was "servile"?) said that semicolons suppose themselves superior to the comma, but are mistaken:

They are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature.

Gertrude Stein, "Poetry and Grammar", 1935

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