DSL July Read: Karen's Pick
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne TrussAs Jay said in the movie Clerks, "He speaks some English, but he cannot speak it good like us."
posted by mary_m @ 12:58 PM
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne TrussAs Jay said in the movie Clerks, "He speaks some English, but he cannot speak it good like us."
Not your momma's book club.
Previous Posts
- DSL June Read: Mary's Pick
- DSL May Read: Gwen's Pick
- DSL April Read: Dusty's Pick
- DSL March Read: Karen's Pick
- DSL February Read: Mary's Pick
- DSL January Read: Brady's Pick
- DSL November Read: Gwen's Pick
- DSL October Read: Dusty's Pick
- DSL September Read: John's Pick
- DSL August Read: Karen's Pick
12 Comments:
I am torn about this book. On the one hand, bad grammar and incorrect punctuation in public places both drive me crazy. It's like I feel PAIN looking at them. There's part of me that wants to run around with a marker correcting all of these horrendous offenses against the English language.
But another part of me feels like an asshole about that. I mean, as long as you get your point across and other people can understand what you mean...isn't it being a little uptight and mean-spirited to belittle them for not writing it according to the "rules" of a language? Especially when those rules are set by some vague group of fancy people at universities or something and then imposed on the masses.
I feel the same way when I hear people ridiculing African Americans who say "aks" instead of "ask." It's not that these people can't understand what is being said; they get the person's meaning easily. It's that they already feel superior to African Americans and language and pronunciation become useful tools for expressing that underlying contempt.
So I have really mixed feelings about language issues in general--I am obsessive about my own writing and following grammar rules, and I can be driven to distraction by my students' papers, and yet in a bigger sense I'm not sure why it matters so much, and I have a suspicion that the reason it matters so much is that it's a form of class distinction.
i love this book and read it years ago.
when i ordered it from the library they mistakenly sent me the cd of the old radio show the the book is based on. very good.
i feel vindicated too. the editors on the shows said writers are the worst to work with because they hear the words in their head and don't see them on the page.
i hope dis ain't no vieled threat agin my bad grammer. (ahahhhahahha) i'm bad about that shit. drive my editors crazy.
i have a question though: i write in the southern dialect --or one of them; my question is this: does it bug you as a reader to see ya'll and agin and when somebody writes "I hep you" (for help); or should i just leave the accent to the reader?
question two: i try to achieve the dialect feel by grammar rather than funny word spellings --does that bug ya'll as readers?
hmmmmmmm,
i'm in maine right now. it's very steven king. we're renewing our vows at an old new england church in the abandoned town of Spurwink. creeeeepy.
on the other hand, i'm reading a book a day, about. harry crews and james elroy. whew.
I just reread "Their Eyes Were Watching God" and "Jonah's Gourd Vine", both by Zora Neale Hurston. She uses lots of weird spellings to get the dialect and pronunciation of Southern blacks in the 1930s. I didn't find it distracting at all--I felt like it helped me get into this world better than if their language was standard English, which wouldn't ring true to me.
So I guess that's sort of my rule about this--if writing the dialogue in standard English wouldn't ring true, and in fact might be distracting, then you need to write in a way that more truthfully gets across the cadences of people's actual speech.
On the other hand, if the non-standard English seems unnatural or is used in a ridiculing sense--like, you feel like a Southern accent is being written just to make a person sound dumb--then it annoys me.
Hurston used both unconventional grammar and unusual spellings b/c sometimes regular spellings just didn't get across the pronunciation that actual people used. I did some of the same in my dissertation--I mean, it was easier there b/c you were transcribing how actual people spoke instead of having to imagine it, but I had to decide if I was going to write "goin'" as "goin'" or "going." I decided to go with the more accurate pronunciation and not go adding things to their language that they didn't use.
You know, we probably should have just pre-emptively named the last Harry Potter book as this month's selection. That probably would have been more realistic.
You know, I can't remember whether this was in my African-American lit class or in my Appalachian lit class, but it would have been appropriate in either one, but I do remember once a lit prof pointing out that even your most mid-western/Californian "neutral" accent, were it actually written like it sounds and not given the "default" status it is, would be as odd-seeming as "hep" for "help," "git" for "get", or "aks" for "ask".
sorry i've been so lax about checking in. i'm in maine and it is slow paced and easy going and i'm just fishing and reading and not checking email very often.
i did, however, go to Mugglefest in Portland Maine. It sold out. They recreated Diagon's Alley and we rode on the Hogwarts Express Train. it was like Halloween/Mardi Gras for 9-14 year olds. and the line for the midnight book drop off was literally a 1/4 mile long and three deep.
all in all, it restored my faith in books and reading. i've never read a harry potter book, but i'm such a fan. go show jk rowlings!
have any of you monkeys read harry potter? would i like'm?
I agree with you Gwen. That's totally what I'm reading right now. So far, all of my theories on what I thought would happen haven't. With that being said, I've almost finished Eats Shoots and Leaves as well and have some comments to make...but just not until I'm done finding out what happens in the Deathly Hallows.
You aren't DONE with Deathly Hallows yet? What, have you been taking breaks to go to the bathroom and eat and act like a halfway normal person or something? Weird.
And Brady, it was not in our Appalachian lit class (with one Dr. T. Carroll)that that distinction was made. But speaking of that really strange class, do you remember the god- awful movie we had to watch about the Harlan County, KY coal miner strike? I have NEVER wanted a cigarette so bad in my life as I did watching that movie. Please tell me you remember this too! Oh, and all the Jesus imagery you pointed out in the book Deliverence or the awful Dollmaker book. I did like the Tall Woman and even got to meet Wilma Dykeman a few years after we graduated. As you can see that class left a strong, if not favorable, impression on me
Dusty...It's technically your pick next, but I was wondering if you'd be willing to switch with me? Mary, Brady, Karen and I are itchin' to read Roy Blount, Jr.'s new book Long Time Leaving, so I thought I could make that my pick and then you could have whatever you were thinking about picking in September, so we take your pick away. I just don't think the rest of us can put off reading the Blount book if we put it off til September.
Let me know what you think.
I won't have internet access in Oklahoma so I won't know what the August pick is til I get back in a week. I'm taking "Long Time Leaving" with me because I'm desperately anxious to start reading it. Being around my family will probably make me especially appreciative of a book about the duality of the Southern thing.
please pick away --
i just got back to my regular life. ah, 5 weeks vacation, what a blast. i read so much . . . .
dust
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