Your Life
inside
LAURA TUTOR
One must love the British.
Truly.
Without them, without astute,
witty, detail-sticklers like Lynne
Truss, the rest of the world would
be mumbling through daily life.
Truss, for those who aren’t
word nerds, is the lady whose
first punctuation primer turned
a panda’s diet into a felony in-
volving gunplay in a restaurant:
Eats, shoots & leaves: The Zero
Tolerance Approach to Punctua-
tion!. It shows how moving one
squiggle of ink, one block of
type, changes the meaning of a
sentence entirely.
Her latest book, The Girl’s
Like Spaghetti: Why You Can’t
Manage Without Apostrophes!
is in the same vein. Consider the
difference: “Those smelly things
are my brother’s” or “Those
smelly things are my brothers.”
Funny, yes? Do things (shoes,
pizza boxes) smell or is it, in-
deed, little boy funk that’s caused
the sister to invoke the “smelly”
descriptor? Is a girl really like
spaghetti?
Absurd as those examples
– pandas, brothers – are, they
represent a common failing in
the e-mail, text messaging and
blogging era. Each LOL or BTW
erodes our ability to communi-
cate. If it’s really funny, do you
have to tell someone that you’re
Laughing Out Loud, or is By The
Way so profound that it has to
have its own little acronym?
That’s not progress and speed.
That’s sad.
The simple fact is that as a
society we’re on the verge of
becoming the most illiterate, the
most ill-spoken and ill-expressed
generation since the Middle
Ages.
Ever read any collections of
letters that our ancestors wrote
home to their families in times
past? Even the lowliest soldier’s
letters dripped with an elegance,
a poignancy that made their
words a treasure. Entire wings
of libraries have been devoted to
letters from great leaders, as well
as letters exchanged between
parents and their children. Those
folks weren’t famous, but their
words are so rich, their thoughts
so worth preserving, their notes
and cards are considered hall-
marks of our history.
When’s the last time you read