shoebox_dw (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shoebox_dw) wrote2008-12-17 06:36 pm
shoebox_dw) wrote2008-12-17 06:36 pm
The secret of good writing: Quote people who're better at it than you are.
I'm having a reread of Lynn Truss' delightful Eats, Shoots and Leaves, and it has done wonders in calming my inner Grammar Nerd. Semicolons forever!
I suppose I might as well make a clean breast of things and identify here as an Anglophile - albeit not the cozy kind. One of the loveliest things about being a Canadian is you get to pick and choose your cultural norms, not only from among UK and American usages but a wide variety of peripherals. Mine tend to be flavoured on the tart end of the spectrum.
But I like British spellings and language conventions, I like their dry and sometimes self-deprecating sense of humour, and I like their habit of clinging onto arcane traditions and names just because there's something rather splendid in their very pointlessness. (Come to think of it, I like the British and their manner of life in the same way fellow North American Bill Bryson does - which is somehow scary and comforting all at once.)
All the things I like best about the English outlook can be summed up neatly in this passage from Martin Amis' review of Iris Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil, as quoted by Truss:
Each page is corrugated by half a dozen underlinings, normally a sure sign of stylistic irresolution. A jangled, surreal (and much shorter) version of the book could be obtained by reading the italic type and omitting the roman. It would go something like this:
deep, significant, awful, horrid, sickening, absolutely disgusting, guilt, accuse, secret, conspiracy, go to the cinema, go for a long walk, an entirely different matter, an entirely new way, become a historian, become a philosopher, never sing again, Stella, jealous, happy, cad, bloody fool, God, Christ, mad, crazy...
...I'm not sure why, but I'm particularly pleased with the way 'Stella' gets worked in there.
I suppose I might as well make a clean breast of things and identify here as an Anglophile - albeit not the cozy kind. One of the loveliest things about being a Canadian is you get to pick and choose your cultural norms, not only from among UK and American usages but a wide variety of peripherals. Mine tend to be flavoured on the tart end of the spectrum.
But I like British spellings and language conventions, I like their dry and sometimes self-deprecating sense of humour, and I like their habit of clinging onto arcane traditions and names just because there's something rather splendid in their very pointlessness. (Come to think of it, I like the British and their manner of life in the same way fellow North American Bill Bryson does - which is somehow scary and comforting all at once.)
All the things I like best about the English outlook can be summed up neatly in this passage from Martin Amis' review of Iris Murdoch's The Philosopher's Pupil, as quoted by Truss:
Each page is corrugated by half a dozen underlinings, normally a sure sign of stylistic irresolution. A jangled, surreal (and much shorter) version of the book could be obtained by reading the italic type and omitting the roman. It would go something like this:
deep, significant, awful, horrid, sickening, absolutely disgusting, guilt, accuse, secret, conspiracy, go to the cinema, go for a long walk, an entirely different matter, an entirely new way, become a historian, become a philosopher, never sing again, Stella, jealous, happy, cad, bloody fool, God, Christ, mad, crazy...
...I'm not sure why, but I'm particularly pleased with the way 'Stella' gets worked in there.