Merrily goes the donkey...

[venta]

A round up of minor arcanities:

Today's word from the calendar is assishness. So far the calendar has produced around half-and-half words which could feasibly be slotted into conversations - this is one such, meaning (unsurprisingly) "asinine quality, stupidity". So off you go: use it today three times in conversation, and once in your LJ.

Having now finished reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves, I can report that I am a fan of the Oxford comma. Which is apparently the correct name for the controversial comma inserted after the penultimate item in a list. So: our main weapons are surprise, our nice red uniforms, and a fanatical dedication to the Pope. See the comma after uniforms ? That's an Oxford comma, that is. I've got no idea why it's so named. And while I don't always put it in lists, sometimes it's very handy. Everyone with an interest in writing should read Eats, Shoots and Leaves, by the way. It manages to steer a pleasingly sane course between the extremes of "punctuation is set in stone" and "punctuation doesn't matter at all".

And, looking for something else, I found this website. Which contains all sorts of odd facts about how to splice tape and create different effects thereby. I don't believe I'm likely to do this, but it interested me none-the-less. Reminded me of the day a schoolfriend and I discovered that you could turn tape inside out to play songs backwards, and spent an educational afternoon looking for hidden messages in songs. We didn't find any.

Comments

[mirabehn.livejournal.com]

Yay to "Eats, Shoots and Leaves"! I talked evil_nick into letting me buy a copy at the weekend. Am very much enjoying it. :)

I'm fairly inconsistent wrt the Oxford comma, but on the whole I tend to be in favour. It puts a slight break where one would put a slight break in speech, and I tend to like that kind of usage.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Having now finished reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves

And, not as advertised, I am now not reading Foucault's Pendulum. Sorry, satyrica :)

This is because the book I borrowed from snow_leopard, which I thought was Foucault's Pendulum actually turns out to be The Island of the Day Before. So I'm reading that instead :)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

So I s'pose it ought to be Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.

The reason I'm not a fan of of this is that, although it clears up:
I went shopping at Tesco's, Boots', and Marks and Spencers', it doesn't help if there are three things listed in the compound term, such as groups of lawyers:
I'm dithering between Smith, Jones, and Davies, Loeck, Stuch, and Barl, or This, That, and the Other.

I *believe* it's the Oxford Comma because OUP, or at least the OED, insist on its use. But there are no references to this in the text I've got to hand.

[venta.livejournal.com]

The reason I'm not a fan of of this is that, although it clears up:
[example snipped]

Er... so you don't like it because it only does one job, not two ? Do you have a better solution ?

I like what it does, when it does it. I didn't say it was infallible :)

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Ah. Now, I don't think they're two separate problems: the second one is an extension of the first. In my view, the problem with the Oxford Comma is that it complicates matters, without going far enough.

Actually, this is partially a reaction to the pedantry of OED lexicographers, who will completely ignore the meaning of an email, whilst (or while ;) still complaining about the missing comma.

Of course, the OED is a bit of a special case, since it does consist mainly of lists, and quite frequently lists of lists. In normal writing, you rarely get such constructs, and the Oxford Comma works quite adequately: I've re-started using it myself!

Oxford comma

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

To hand is Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford (37th ed., 1967):

Where and joins two single words or phrases the comma is usually omitted:
The honourable and learned member.
But where more than two words or phrases occur together in a sequence a comma should precede the final and:
A great, wise, and beneficient measure.

Good to see a sentence beginning with but there.

[waistcoatmark.livejournal.com]

Confusion like that is probably why they print the title of the book on its cover.

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

Chrononotonthologos is my word for today.
Shame it would be rather tricky to get it into scrabble really.

[satyrica.livejournal.com]

okay, now you're just showing off- what aspect of tie is that the study of?

[satyrica.livejournal.com]

or time even

[leathellin.livejournal.com]

Well.. i'm not entirely sure. Studier of the passing of time, ish. I think. I'm not entirely sure the author didn't just make it up.
Been in print for almost 100 years now though so it's bound to have made it to official word-dom ;-)

[sampiano.livejournal.com]

Eats, Shoots and Leaves

Did you get that for christmas also? I wonder how much our christmas lists overlapped!

[venta.livejournal.com]

I did indeed.

Did you get a can of WD40, a set of African Witch-Doctor's Bones[*], and a Thermarest (http://www.cascadedesigns.com/thermarest/) as well ?

[*] I mean, of course, the kind of bones you cast. Not the poor Witch-Doctor's own bones. That'd be far too risky.

[sampiano.livejournal.com]

No. But I'm jealous of the thermarest!

After that, my christmas list included a gift set containing deoderant and a radio (who thinks of these things!), the (auto)biography of the Pythons (as in the Monte variety), a Go board, and loads of clothes.

[nalsa.livejournal.com]

The first Jeremy Vine show - not that I'd normally listen to R2 - of the year had him asking listeners to phone in with "how many copies of Eats, Shoots and Leaves did you get for Christmas?"

I didn't get any, but I did buy a few copies for people.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

There were three copies of that damn book around at Christmas, none of them gifts for me, thank goodness. Then I read it and was charmed out of grouchiness. I have previously enjoyed Lynne Truss's jolly novel Tennyson's Gift.

[maviscruet.livejournal.com]

Grammer for me has allways been an optional extra, along with spelling......

I do have a copy of eats, shoots and leaves it's for my brother the grammer pedant.

[(Anonymous)]

'our main weapons are surprise,'

Surely, as an item in a list preceding the penultimate which, I agree, needs an Oxford comma, there should be a semi-colon after surprise.

[cuthbertcross.livejournal.com]

I like the Oxford comma; it's small, neat, and surprisingly frequent.
*double takes*
Ooh! There goes another one!
(Got the book for Xmas too, though I know a *far* ruder version of the cover title joke....)

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

I thought that was the default version, and Lynne Truss had been prevailed upon to clean it up.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I think this Oxford comma is fine in cases like the above, where you're switching from single word list items to phrases, so you want a break between the two parts of the list.

In cases like the putative "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" I think it's superfluous. It's not a break, it's purely a list separator. But "and" is already doing the job being a list separator. The comma therefore doesn't mean anything, so it shouldn't be there.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yup, I wasn't advocating it in every list.

I don't think I'd go so far as to call your example above wrong, but I wouldn't write it. (Well, not on purpose, anyway.)