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    In today's Times (London, chaps, London), one of my favourite
    blondes, Lynn Truss, has a lovely extract from her latest work -
    a book on the whole wide subject of punctution. (I can hardly wait
    to buy it.)

    The chapter in question concerns The Comma. She recalls the long,
    desperately fought war between Thurber & Harold Ross over
    the proper employment of this particular mark. Ross, apparently,
    was so obsessed with clarity that he wanted them inserted on every
    conceivable occasion, whilst Thurber felt the fewer the better: that all
    they did was hold up the action & flow of narrative. She reports
    the two of them - what she rather flatteringly calls 'these two hard
    drinking alpha males' - banging their glasses on the table in mutual
    exasperation, night after night, trading commas & semicolons like
    litigious sons sqaubbling over the deeds to the old plantation.

    That last was my own image but Lynn's rather more commanding
    one compares commas to sheep dogs endlessly circling the hillside,
    rounding up the straying words & phrases until they stand shivering,
    obedient & fearful, in their neat, discreet corrals.

    I'm all too aware of being a Ross/Comma man myself. I can't seem
    to break the habit - any more than I can the use of the '-', which seems
    to have become a serious problem only after the arrival of the internet.
    Where will it all end? Chronic disseminated colonitis? Terminal
    ampersands? Intracerebral screamers?

    Scottie B.

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Received on Sat Nov 1 09:17:11 2003