Grammar Girl
In a bout of bad judgment, CNN no longer puts dates on its articles, but I just stumbled across this article about Grammar Girl there. (It looks like it went up in January.) I’ve been listening to her podcast for a month or two now, and have found it invaluable.
She recently weighed in on a dispute over apostrophes that divided the U.S. Supreme Court. Grammar wasn’t the issue in the 5-4 decision, but Justice Clarence Thomas referred to “Kansas’ statute” in the majority opinion, while Justice David Souter wrote about “Kansas’s statute” in the minority.
Fogarty said both men were correct, but that she preferred leaving off the extra s.
“Justice Thomas’ name ends with an s, so you might guess that he is more familiar with the issue,” she told her audience.
The dirty secret of the Hesperia Star is that Peter and I really aren’t grammarians in the way that Mrs. Nyrop back at South Lakes High School would no doubt like me to be. Instead, we’ve internalized grammatical rules through lots of reading and lots of writing. Grammar Girl, though, makes learning the actual rules pretty painless. Her use of “Lay Down Sally” to explain lay/lie was particularly inspired and one of my favorite episodes.
She’s definitely worth a listen even for casual writers.
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there’s a great little book I got a year or two ago called ‘Eats Shoots & Leaves’ (Lynne Truss) that talks about how grammar is mis-used. I don’t know if US grammar usage is different from UK (should it be? buggered if I know), but it’s a very entertaining read if you can your hands on it.
Comment by Tony — June 15, 2007 @ 2:58