Thread: In defense of punctuation

Originally Posted by TheOriginalGrumpySpy

I believe the title itself is making fun of the Oxford comma. Vampire Weekend did it first.

Look at the title again:

Eats, Shoots and Leaves

There is no Oxford comma there. The title is from a sentence that said something like "The panda eats shoots and leaves." The moron who wrote the sentence originally

Originally Posted by gwahir

I really can't remember. I think he found a bunch of mistakes, or half-truths in it (being the very crazy genius he was) and decided that it was a shithouse authority on grammar and punctuation.

EDIT: I dumped the class because he was insane and the course was boring.

He might be one of those assholes that believes that things like "You can't begin a sentence with a conjunction" are real rules that should be followed for good writing rather than old wives' tales made up by 19th century school marms.

Originally Posted by gwahir

No, he wasn't that kind of person. He was the kind of person who believed that if you were going to claim to be an authority, you had to get it right. You have to know what the rules are, even if you choose not to follow them.

He wants language use to be purposeful, and he believed (rightly, I think) that you have to know what's right in order to use language purposefully.

Well, could you give an example of one of his criticism, if you remember one?

Given that he's a linguist, he would most likely be at the other end of the spectrum. Linguists, as compared to those who "study English" or are in "defense of English," are more amenable to evolution and changes in language.

For example, a sign's message that the author includes as a mistake in the book is the following:

Customer Restroom

She argues implicitly that it should be:

Customers' Restroom

I disagree. I think that "Customer Restroom" is perfectly acceptable, just as is "employee discount" or "store credit."

Originally Posted by sycld

Look at the title again:

Eats, Shoots and Leaves

There is no Oxford comma there. The title is from a sentence that said something like "The panda eats shoots
and leaves." The moron who wrote the sentence originally

This was an interpretation thing because I totally had it in my mind, for a bit of time, that it should have been more comically: "Eats, shoots, and leaves"