Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [14]
She uses more than two hundred pages of text to advocate for more and better punctuation even while admitting that “modern technological communication threatens to wipe out the subtleties of punctuation altogether.”24 Apparently trying unconsciously to prove her last point, she gets caught advocating more punctuation than her own sample sentences can decently bear.
She is also just plain wrong in many areas, according to Louis Menand. The Pulitzer Prize–winning author found many misplaced commas, semicolons, apostrophes, and parentheses, plus a failure to adjust the book’s style to an American audience unfamiliar with British punctuation style.25
If an expert on punctuation can’t do any better than that, perhaps the answer is to omit all kinds of marks, period. That might satisfy all the buyers of her book who expected stories about pandas.
AN ARMY OF CURMUDGEONS
Truss is merely one of many curmudgeons who have been fighting a rear-guard action even while losing the war to retain formal English pretty much as it always has been. Their weapons of choice in recent years have been books with cutesy titles but questionable purposes. Truss’s subtitle reveals her grim and unrealistic aim: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. For this, she is now worth millions.
Among similar titles published since her 2003 bestseller are Between You and I; A Little Book of Bad English; Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies; The Gremlins of Grammar; Woe Is I; and When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It. Despite the cleverness of these titles and many others like them, informal English keeps picking up speed, leveling almost all roadblocks and bumps along the way.
The strained humor of these books shields their main purpose: to mercilessly exploit the average person’s hidden shame that they can’t handle their own language any better than they do. Rare is the native speaker of formal English who has complete confidence when speaking or writing.
Books may not be the ideal way of communicating with people who want to get better at punctuating sentences. A survey done for an independent publishing service showed that 42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.26
THE SIGNS OF CHANGE
Long-standing rules and traditions are being increasingly ignored by all levels of society. Among the fading commandments are these:
Thou shalt not make a sentence without a subject, object, and verb.
Thou shalt not make verbs out of nouns.
Thou shalt modify verbs with adverbs, not adjectives.
Thou shalt use the subjunctive form of verbs when referring to conditional or emotional situations.
Thou shalt not use like and you know as meaningless conversation fillers.
Thou shalt not refer back to a singular subject of a sentence with a plural pronoun, such as saying “anyone can go their own way.”
Thou shalt not use the word like for such as, like in this sentence.
Thou shalt use a possessive, not objective, pronoun with a verb ending in -ing, such as saying “he didn’t mind their going,” rather than them going.
Thou shalt not put subjects of sentences in the objective case, such as “Bob and me went to the store”
Thou shalt not use the word be for irregular forms of the verb to be in the present tense, such as saying “I be going.”
Thou shalt not excessively use abbreviations or acronyms.
Thou shalt spell words correctly no matter what spell-check or your inner soul says.
Thou shalt not elide verb forms such as going to and want to into gonna and wanna, no matter how much you wanna.
Thou shalt always punctuate, and pronounce, words correctly.
Thou shalt not use words not heritaged in the Oxford English Dictionary.
If you add all these and other rule changes to the unprecedented flow of new