I’m confident that over the past four years, this Forum has already clarified most if not all of the vexing grammar dilemmas taken up by Mary Norris in her book
Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (W. W. Norton & Company, 240 pages), but I’m pretty sure that her irreverent, laugh-out-loud take on many of them would prove to be a delightfully instructive, perhaps much more memorable reading.
Mary Norris, a copy editor at
The New Yorker, has spent more than three decades on the job with a magazine that has earned an enviable reputation for its sterling care for words. Now she has come up with an authoritative yet immensely entertaining guidebook on how to deal with errant spelling, faulty punctuation, and writing abominations like comma faults, dangling prepositions, inappropriate pronouns, badly compounded words, and gender-biased English.
But why, of all things, did Mary Norris allow herself to be called a “comma queen”?
She explains that
The New Yorker is fond of commas. Indeed, she says, “We get a lot of letters from people who think we use too many commas.” By way of example, she uses in the book an example of what she calls “a discretionary comma,” like the comma in this sentence: “It gives starch to the prose, and can be very effective.” In such cases, she says, “I always think: ‘The writer likes that comma. That comma is doing something.’ And sometimes I take it out, and sometimes I leave it in.”
John McPhee, the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and a regular contributor to
The New Yorker since 1963, says of the author: “Mary Norris is the verbal diagnostician I would turn to for a first, second, or third opinion on just about anything.”
Read Sarah Lyall’s “Mary Norris Muses on a Lifetime of Literary Vigilance in ‘Between You & Me’” in The New York Times now! Read “Just ‘Between You & Me,’ Here Are Some Handy Grammar Tips,” an interview with Mary Norris, in NPR.org now!RELATED READING:In “From Lunch (n.) To Balding (adj.), Some Words Are Just ‘Bad English,’” the NPR.org staff interviews Ammon Shea, author of the book
Bad English: A History of Linguistic Aggravation (Perigee Books, 272 pages). The book documents how the language has grown, embracing words and usages that various self-appointed linguistic police have declared contraband, like “dilapidated,” “balding,” and “lunch” for starters. Asked about his strong aversion to troublesome words and his other linguistic pet peeves, Shea says: “I’m not an absolute nihilist as far as language is concerned, and I don’t think that we should throw out all the rules. I operate from a position that I think many of the rules that we hold on to are capricious and arbitrary and do more to stunt the language than to kind of foster change and innovation.”
Read a partial transcript of NPR.org’s interview of Ammon Shea now!
