Finnegans Wake

Finished reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves (by Lynne Truss) and found it delectable. I did manage (or so I thought) to find an opening round bracket without its pair. Of course, I didn't want (actually, I wouldn't have been able to) to shred it apart like The New Yorker did, though one suspects just a case of sophisticated name-calling (she called it "famously punctilious" and the magazine suspected the book "might be a hoax").

The New Yorker's view that Truss was hedging her bets by not insisting on perfect correctness while unable to get a lot of pedantic grammar right may not be without reason. But the book is a great read for most of us who're in the middle ground with a decent but flawed grammar basis, who at the same time are fighting off the tendency to write proper while texting (I don't mind lapsing into consonant-ese there because my phone's text interface sucks and the less I key in, the better for my fingers). I do try and correct my mistakes wherever possible in normal writing.

Whether I want to be a vigilante as Truss cheerily asks us to (with markers in our quivers ready to pounce on offensive typos), I don't know, but I do feel the itch to correct the commonly seen misplacement of apostrophes which is to be seen prominently outside DVD & Video lending libraries. There is a notice in the Mechanical Department here announcing "Duties for TA's" (sic). So far I have fought off the urge to correct it. Perhaps this repression isn't such a good idea, so the next time I walk past it, I think I'll summon up the courage to join the Panda and wipe out an excess grammatical character.

{P.S.: If you're wondering what the title of this post has got to do with this article, then it means you haven't seen the Jonathan Creek episode called "Ghosts Forge" and you should read this.}

{P.P.S: I don't want to know about the grammatical (or any other) errors in this post, thank you}