Lynne Truss on language activism

How long will it be before a mainstream publisher allows an illiterate title into print? How long before the last few punctuation sticklers are obliged to take refuge together in caves?

So what I propose is action. Sticklers unite, you have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion, and arguably you didn’t have a lot of that to begin with. Maybe we won’t change the world, but at least we’ll feel better. The important thing is to unleash your Inner Stickler, while at the same time not getting punched in the nose, or arrested for damage to private property…Be a nuisance. Do something. And if possible use a bright red pen. Send back emails that are badly punctuated; return letters; picket Harrods. Who cares if members of your family abhor your Inner Stickler and devoutly wish you had an Inner Scooby-Doo instead? At least if you adopt a zero tolerance approach, when you next see a banner advertising “CD’s, DVD’s, Video’s, and Book’s”, you won’t just stay indoors getting depressed about it. Instead you will engage in some direct-action argy-bargy! Because–here’s the important thing–you won’t be alone.

That’s always been the problem for sticklers, you see. The feeling of isolation. The feeling of nerdishness. One solitary obsessive, feebly armed with an apostrophe on a stick, will never have the nerve to demonstrate outside Warner Brothers on the issue of Two Weeks Notice. But if enough people could pull together in a common cause, who knows what we might accomplish?…

There is just one final thing holding us back, then. It is that every man [sic] is his own stickler. And while I am very much in favor or forming an army of well-informed punctuation vigilantes, I can foresee problems getting everyone to pull in the same direction…When you by nature subscribe to the view that everyone except yourself is a berk or a wanker, it is hard to bond with anybody in any rational common cause.

You think those thuggish chaps in movie heist gangs fall out a bit too quickly and mindlessly? Well, sticklers are worse…

—Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Who knew sticklers and radical feminists had so much in common?

Filed under: language, satire, words from women by Amy's Brain Today