Quotes by Lynne Truss - Page 2

The reason it's worth standing up for punctuation is not that it's an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.
Lynne Truss / Writer
Arbitrary
Vapour
Way
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Thurber was asked by a correspondent: "Why did you have a comma in the sentence, 'After dinner, the men went into the living-room'?" And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. "This particular comma," Thurber explained, "was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.
Lynne Truss / Writer
Men
Answers
Giving
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As someone who sends texts messages more or less non-stop, I enjoy one particular aspect of texting more than anything else: that it is possible to sit in a crowded railway carriage laboriously spelling out quite long words in full, and using an enormous amount of punctuation, without anyone being aware of how outrageously subversive I am being.
Lynne Truss / Writer
Long
Messages
Texting
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Offence is so easily given. And where the 'minority' issue is involved, the rules seem to shift about: most of the time a person who is female/black/disabled/gay wants this not to be their defining characteristic; you are supposed to be blind to it. But then, on other occasions, you are supposed to observe special sensitivity, or show special respect.
Lynne Truss / Writer
Black
Gay
Issues
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To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday" (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler.
Lynne Truss / Writer
Average
Friday
Writing
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The problem is that it has become politically awkward to draw attention to absolutes of bad and good. In place of manners, we now have doctrines of political correctness, against which one offends at one's peril: by means of a considerable circular logic, such offences mark you as reactionary and therefore a bad person. Therefore if you say people are bad, you are bad.
Lynne Truss / Writer
Mean
People
Political
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It should come as no surprise that writers take an interest in punctuation. I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, "I should have used fewer semicolons" - and although I have spent months fruitlessly trying to track down the chap responsible, I believe it none the less. If it turns out that no one actually did say this on their deathbed, I shall certainly save it up for my own.
Lynne Truss / Writer
Believe
Should Have
Track
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We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.
Lynne Truss / Writer
Degrees
Intellectual
Thinking
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I mean, full stops are quite important, aren't they? Yet by contrast to the versatile apostrophe, they are stolid little chaps, to say the least. In fact one might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burn-out from all the thankless effort.
Lynne Truss / Writer
Jobs
Effort
Mean
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For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.
Lynne Truss / Writer
Book
Emotional
Pain
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A Panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots into the air. "Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife annual and tosses it over his shoulder. "I'm a Panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up." The waiter turns to the relevant entry, and, sure enough, finds an explanation. Panda. Large black and white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.
Lynne Truss / Writer
Black And White
Confused
Gun
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The rule is: the word 'it's' (with apostrophe) stands for 'it is' or 'it has'. If the word does not stand for 'it is' or 'it has' then what you require is 'its'. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best', you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.
Lynne Truss / Writer
Doe
Lightning
Writing
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...when a phone call competes for attention with a real-world conversation, it wins. Everyone knows the distinctive high-and-dry feeling of being abandoned for a phone call, and of having to compensate - with quite elaborate behaviours = for the sudden half-disappearance of the person we were just speaking to. 'Go ahead!' we say. 'Don't mind us! Oh look, here's a magazine I can read!' When the call is over, other rituals come into play, to minimise the disruption caused and to restore good feeling.
Lynne Truss / Writer
Phones
Real
Winning
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Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social 'group' focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon.
Lynne Truss / Writer
Icons
Simple
Skills
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Well, start waving and yelling, because it is the so-called Oxford comma and it is a lot more dangerous than its exclusive, ivory-tower moniker might suggest. There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken. Oh, the Oxford comma. Here, in case you don't know what it is yet, is the perennial example, as espoused by Harold Ross: "The flag is red, white, and blue." So what do you think of it? Are you for or against it? Do you hover in between?
Lynne Truss / Writer
Ivory
Taken
Thinking
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