Eats Shoots And Leaves

Lynne Truss: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (ISBN 1592400876 )

Either this will ring bells for you, or it won't. A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near to where I live. "Come inside," it says, "for CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's." If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once.

Argh!

A rallying cry for those horrified by plunging standards of grammar, and an essential starting-point for those who know they could do better. Wield white-out and a Magic Marker with pride, and JustSayNo? to incorrect punctuation (and the ApostropheCatastrophe)!

Silly me. I saw this and thought lady was misspelled.

I'm usually sympathetic to this kind of thing, and I do try to use apostrophes according to current guidelines, but I think that this is a poor example of supposed bad usage. The example above of using apostrophes with plural on acronyms does break usage guidelines, but it is a very functional thing to do. It makes perfect sense, and is a way to clarify what is being communicated - it just doesn't happen to be the accepted way to do so.

That's different from most other misuses of punctuation, such as the ghastly scare-quote, also often seen in shop windows, that has no functional purpose at all and just screams "I'm illiterate!": 

  "SALE" TODAY "THROUGH" FRIDAY "ONLY"!
Although, looking at the example again: 
  CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's
there are two misspellings, which should be VIDEOS and BOOKS. I'm not sympathetic to the apostrophe there; this is exactly the same as the common misspelling of "its" as "it's" (although, since both are legal, just about everyone switches them sometimes unless they proofread, so we should be fairly relaxed about that).

The remaining two, "CD's and DVD's" versus "CDs and DVDs" are what I'm talking about. What if your medium forces upper case only? Is "CDS and DVDS" really preferable to "CD'S and DVD'S"? I don't think so! The apostrophe is technically incorrect according to prescriptive mavens, but it actually does facilitate rather than hinder communication.

So it's not at all a good example of the problem that the book title amusingly refers to. (Note the "to" at the end of sentence; prescriptivists have often said that's incorrect, but they were simply wrong. It happens often, because there's a battle between thinking about situational functionality versus blindly following rules of usually-dubious origin, and they've chosen the wrong side.)

Incidentally, my text above is missing some minor punctuation in some places where I have mixed feelings about the standard guidelines, and probably a couple other places where I didn't notice. Comments are welcome on that, considering the page topic.

Is "CDS and DVDS" really preferable to "CD'S and DVD'S"? I don't think so!

By my view, yes, in fact, it is. In fact, it's quite preferable. The very purpose of an apostrophe is to add information, not to delimit it. Apostrophes indicate possession or contraction. However, for an acronym, it is unambiguous to say "WE HAVE CDS, TRACKS, AND BOOKS.". If you use an apostrophe there, what are you going to do when you need a possessive plural? "ALL OF THE CD'S' FIRST TRACKS ARE VERY NICE." seems a bad solution to a problem that need not exist - use apostrophes solely for indication of possession or contraction, and you remove significant ambiguity from the language. For the most part, I avoid contractions so that the purity of possession can be increased. But then it is reduced again to denote italics on Ward's Wiki...

I agree, both "CD's" and "CD'S" are inferior to both "CDs" and "CDS". By some style guides, it's OK to use "CD's", but this approach is bad because it completely destroys the distinction between plural and possessive forms - not just in the example at hand, but in general. What I mean is this: most people just aren't aware of the far-reaching destructiveness of common spelling mistakes. In just about every real-world example containing "DVD's", it's a matter of one or two seconds to figure out whether it's talking about multiple DVDs or some DVD's features. If you happened to speed-read over the term, assuming one of those possibilities, and in the next line it turns out you assumption is probably wrong, it takes maybe three or four seconds to figure out what happened - again, no big deal. But now imagine you're reading in a context in which you've got used to stumbling over "DVD's" vs "DVDs" over and over again. Say, a certain newsgroup, mailing-list, message-board, blog, whatever. Note that only a minority of messages containing "DVD*" need to get it wrong in order to make you repeatedly stumble over the phrase, even in cases where everything is correct but you just learned to distrust it. You'll just resort to spending the one or two seconds it takes to settle the issue right away every time, instead of allowing the text to confuse you and force you to spend the three or four seconds it takes to get back on track again. Now if this particular kind of apostrophe catastrophe is the only source of common misspellings in the context at hand, there's still no big deal. But imagine the good people there also can't tell "its" apart from "it's", "effect" from "affect", etc., and there's a considerable list of expressions you learned to distrust and maneuver through very carefully. The result is not that you can't understand the text because it is too ambiguous and not precise enough. The real result is that your reading speed has been slashed in half.

Someone above suggested that we should be relaxed about the "it's" vs "its" issue because both are 'legal'. Precisely the fact that "it's" actually exists and can not be skimmed over, implicitly changing it, in your mind, to "its" because you know "it's" doesn't exists so it has to be "its", is what makes this an issue at all. And precisely because it is an issue we shouldn't ignore it but be extra careful in such cases and make sure we get them wrong. You don't have to proofread everything you write just to get it right, you just need to learn the few words you personally are having problems with and get used to getting them right. This list will always be extremely short because every time you discover something new, you'll have already wiped out some older mistake. Once you become aware of some mistake you keep making the problem is already pretty much solved.

Spelling mistakes have to be fixed in writing, not reading. Once you've thought about it, this is so trivial that I feel silly pointing it out, but because most people don't think about it I'll do it anyway: every text that is written more often than read is utterly useless and not worthy of any consideration. Every other text is read more often than written and thus it saves everyone a ton of time if we just write correctly and allow others to read that much more quickly and not force them to put together a puzzle whenever they try to understand our thoughts.

In a nutshell: don't be relaxed about issues like "it's" vs "its". It is socially unacceptable to annoy the heck out of everyone by being a "spelling/grammar Nazi", but within the realm of good behaviour and nice conduct, by all means do point and laugh at people who make such mistakes and make their ears burn with embarrassment. It'll help them do it right next time. That's the whole reason why schadenfreude survived the process of evolution. We experience it because it's a good thing.

I'm not at all a prescriptivist, but... some things really bug me. Foremost is people who don't know the difference between complement and compliment. What's really odd about this is that there isn't one spelling that has become common for this - instead, people tend to misspell both meanings, and they tend to do it more than 50% of the time _in both cases_.

I don't think she addresses spelling. But there are things that bug me too. See LoseNotLoose. Maybe we need a page for punctuation, spelling, and grammar bugaboos.

Hmm... I guess I don't see this as a spelling problem (but maybe I'm wrong about that). It's not that people are misspelling the word (I misspell things all the time, I'm afraid), it's that they are using a word that is pronounced the same, but spelled differently... kind of like "eats, shoots and leaves", come to think of it.

[they're not pronounced the same, though - the 's' in loose is unvoiced, while the 's' in 'lose' is voiced (loose is /lu:s/ and lose is /lu:z/, in ipa)]

(I agree absolutely - when I see people use loose instead of lose, I just assume that they are barely literate, and, I have to admit, I tend to discount anything else they say, at least if I think they are native English speakers. Some things are unforgivable, even for a descriptivist. I was referring to complement/compliment though - sorry for the confusion).

Ironically it's exactly native English speakers who tend to get this wrong. I'm a native German speaker, so I think of 'lose' as 'verlieren' and of 'loose' as 'lose', which are so utterly different that I'd never, never ever confuse them.

There was an interesting article recently in the New Yorker pretty much leaving the above text in tatters for committing scores of sins of style and punctuation.

I was recently given a copy of this book, which is being passed off as a humorous guide to improving punctuation. However, apart from the cover joke which is rather funny, it's mostly just a pompous and humorless rant, unable to grasp that language evolves and expressiveness is much more important than simply blindly following ancient, inconsistent rules. Its position might have a legitimate point if modern standardized punctuation were taught in schools but it is not. I was never taught punctuation at school, just expected to absorb it through osmosis when reading the widely different styles from Shakespeare to Orwell.

Well the problem is that what you are trying to express should be easily understood (unless, of course, it's the content that's difficult to understand). Here's a paraphrase from the excerpt linked to above:

One writer tells us that punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop. But best of all, I think, is the simple advice given by the style book of a national newspaper: that punctuation is "a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling."

It is no accident that the word "punctilious" (attentive to formality or etiquette) comes from the same original root word as punctuation.

Isn't the analogy with good manners perfect? Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. As we shall see, the practice of "pointing" our writing has always been offered in a spirit of helpfulness, to underline meaning and prevent awkward misunderstandings between writer and reader.

It's certainly unfortunate that your education (and quite a lot of people's, obviously) was lacking in some of the basics in proper English usage, but that's not the fault of the language. Personally, I found the excerpt to be humorous and not pompous at all. It also seems incredibly ironic to me that a site for programmers would contain discussions about the need for proper syntax.

[How can you find other than "personally"? Good English, including spelling, punctuation, style and proof-correction, should be taught to all who will need to communicate effectively in English.]

I find it almost funny that a large cross section of "English speakers" so ardently defend their carelessness with the language with such general declarations as "languages evolve," thus excusing a variety of linguistic contortions.

Yes, languages evolve. New vocabulary is unavoidable. Kids think up "cool" expressions that become entrenched in their "culture" and are carried forward even into adulthood.

But if you don't want to have layers of intralinguistic translation dictionaries to allow understanding today what was written a mere 50 years ago, it's well to color inside the lines.

The relationship between spoken language and computer language isn't a clean mapping, but it's worth noting that if you want your stuff to compile, you don't argue with the compiler. You write according to the rules, without whining that you "should be allowed to say it this way" when the compiler hauls you up short.

Yes, add vocabulary. Quit messing with the syntax. Parsing sentences in your native language should not have to involve a cultural crystal ball.

so ardently defend their carlessness - ooohhh, Garry, what a time to not bother proofreading!!

See: EnglishLanguagePrescriptiveness, PurityOfEnglish, LanguageAbuser, ApostropheCatastrophe, SingularThey, PunctuationIsImportant

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