As I mentioned in my last post, I have a problem with semi-colons and colons. This realization didn't just come to me out of the blue, though. I've been feeling ashamed of myself because I've been reading
Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris, who is a long-time proofreader at
The New Yorker. There are parts of this book that are laugh-out-loud funny, which I was not at all expecting in a book about grammar. Titles of chapters include, "Comma Comma Comma Comma, Chameleon" and "F*ck This Sh*t." Here is a sample insight, from my favorite chapter, which is on dashes, semicolons and colons:
Americans can do without the semicolon, just as they can give Marmite a pass...We are a plainspoken, cheerfully vulgar people. Which is not to say that Mark Twain couldn't or didn't use semicolons--only that Huck Finn would find them fancy.
On this particularly point I must quarrel with you, Mary. If you read my dissertation, you would know that this particular American
loves semicolons (and colons, too!). Marmite I'm not so keen on, but semicolons are delicious. Perhaps I like them precisely
because Huck Finn would find them fancy?
This problem I have with grammar goes back a long, long time. In fact, the only test I ever failed was an 8th grade English exam on grammar. (I got a D, actually, which was basically as low as you could go in my supportive and very expensive private middle school.) I was mostly indignant about this failure--I thought my teacher was an idiot. Not an idiot overall, because otherwise I rather liked him, but I thought that anyone who actually expected me to know this arbitrary grammatical nonsense had no common sense. I got As on most of my papers, so why did I need to know about direct and indirect clauses, or the proper use of the subjective case?
I went home complaining about the idiocy of my English teacher, and I expected some sympathy, since my mother had instructed me on more than one occasion to ignore my teachers if I thought they were being stupid. In this instance, though, she surprised me by insisting that to be a good writer I would need to know proper grammar. And then she sat me down and began
diagramming sentences and explaining various types of predicates.
As it stands, and despite my mother's efforts, I have a blunderers knowledge of grammar--if it sounds right to me, I just go with it. And whenever my mother reads something I've written, she invariably points out all of the infinitives I've split along the way. I sent my mother a copy of my dissertation months ago and I'm secretly hoping she never reads it. If she does, she'll be horrified. Mary Norris would be too.
Throughout her book, Norris mentions certain
New Yorker writers with immaculate prose and she hints about those who needed a lot of help. Learning that some authors published in
The New Yorker actually needed
help gave me a twinge of hope. I'm not necessarily doomed. I just need to find someone who enjoys diagramming sentences--but do they even teach that in school anymore?
