Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

Fiddlesticks” is Scarlett O’Hara’s way of saying “Fuck this shit.

Whom" may indeed be on the way out, but so is Venice, and we still like to go there.

Why, if there is alphabet soup, do we not have punctuation cereal?

First we get the rocks out, Alice. Then we get the pebbles out. Then we get the sand out, and the writer’s voice rises. No harm done.

The English language is full of words that are just waiting to be misspelled, and the world is full of sticklers, ready to pounce.

But good writers have a reason for doing things the way they do them, and if you tinker with their work, taking it upon yourself to neutralize a slightly eccentric usage or zap a comma or sharpen the emphasis of something that the writer was deliberately keeping obscure, you are not helping. In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process. They weigh queries, and they accept or reject them for good reasons. They are not defensive. The whole point of having things read before publication is to test their effect on a general reader. You want to make sure when you go out there that the tag on the back of your collar isn’t poking up—unless, of course, you are deliberately wearing your clothes inside out.

Muphry’s Law: “If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.

Sing in me, o Muse, of that small minority of men who are secure enough in their masculinity to use the feminine third-person singular!

Nobody knows everything—one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn—and everybody makes mistakes.

I can’t help but think that the way we punctuate now is the right way—that we are living in a punctuation renaissance.

Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar.

who” stands in for “he, she, they, I, we”; “whom” stands in for “him, her, them, me, us.

Spelling is the clothing of words, their outward visible sign, and even those who favour sweatpants in everyday life like to make a bella figura, as the Italians say – a good impression – in their prose.

You had to be willing to admit that you were capable of missing something or you would not catch what you missed.

I always wanted to write a book, but it looked really hard: how did you get all the lines to come out even on the right-hand side of the page?

Punctuation is a deeply conservative club. It hardly ever admits a new member.

Because English has so many words of foreign origin, and words that look the same but mean something different depending on their context, and words that are in flux, opening and closing like flowers in time-lapse photography, the human element is especially important if we are to stay on top of the computers, which, in their determination to do our job for us, make decisions so subversive that even professional wordsmiths are taken by surprise.

The seven words George Carlin said you couldn’t say on TV or radio (“fuck,” “piss,” “shit,” “cunt,” “motherfucker,” “cocksucker,” and “tits”).

You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words.

I would never disable spell-check. That would be hubris. Autocorrect I could do without.

In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process.

The image of the copy editor is of someone who favours a rigid consistency, a mean person who enjoys pointing out other people’s errors, a lowly person who is just starting on her career in publishing and is eager to make an impression, or, at worst, a bitter, thwarted person who wanted to be a writer and instead got stuck dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s and otherwise advancing the careers of other writers.

The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler.

So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.

Some women bristle, in certain contexts, at being called female: it seems to focus exclusively on the reproductive system, and makes you feel like a chicken, all thighs and breasts.

Back in the twentieth century, we thought that robots would have taken over by this time, and, in a way, they have. But robots as a race have proved disappointing. Instead of getting to boss around underlings made of steel and plastic with circuitry and blinking lights and tank treads, like Rosie the maid on The Jetsons, we humans have outfitted ourselves with robotic external organs. Our iPods dictate what we listen to next, gadgets in our cars tell us which way to go, and smartphones finish our sentences for us. We have become our own robots.

I once asked Eleanor Gould how to make the plural possessive of McDonald’s, and she very sensibly told me to leave it alone. “You have to stop somewhere,” she said. We stopped at McDonald’ses’.

A colon is sometimes preferable to a semicolon if the thrust of the sentence is forward: you are amplifying something, providing a definition or a list or an illustration. The semicolon sets up a different relationship; whatever follows relates in a more subtle way to what came before. A dash can perform either of these services, but it is looser, less formal.

Teall feels that the words that lose the hyphen and become solid tend to be figurative (cowcatcher), while the ones that retain the hyphen are literal (bronco-buster). The same logic seems to be behind The New Yorker’s decision about “hard-boiled” and “hardboiled.

The received wisdom about compounds is that they start out as two words, acquire a transitional hyphen, and then lose the hyphen, becoming one word. “Today” used to be hyphenated. “Ringtone” was two words for about a nanosecond before solidifying, skipping the hyphen stage completely.