Lots of laughs help the grammar hints go down!

How long has it been since I was able to post book reviews? Too darn long, for sure, as I’ve been knocked off my feet by a flood of family and health issues. Now, I feel the reading/reviewing mojo return, beginning with two aimed directly at writers:

Review of: Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

Author: Mary Norris

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Grade: B

Source: Dallas Public Library

In Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, Mary Norris spreads a feast for grammar nerds, word addicts and writers (or anyone else) who's ever wondered what really goes on in the world of publishing. The longtime copy editor for The New Yorker untangles the ins and outs of punctuation and grammar with equal amounts of humor and panache while parading a cast of fellow magazine employees in all their eccentric, conscientious and sometimes maddening variety.

Norris discusses her book's eponymous grammar error while urging readers to deal gently with its perpetuators. "(They) are all humbling themselves by putting another person first. . . if they were not so f***ing polite, if they occasionally put themselves first, they would know they had it wrong. No one would begin a confidence with ‘Between I and you. . . ’”

(Yes, Between You & Me includes a chapter to the use of profanity in writing. "You cannot legislate language," she writes, while admitting a fondness for "the blessed euphemism: the asterisks standing in for the vowels are interior punctuation, little fireworks inside the words.")

I got a bit tangled in Norris's discussion of transitive verbs and linking verbs (for she prefers the racier term, "copulative verbs"). This is to deal with the conundrum of "who vs. whom," although the short answer is when in doubt, use "who" -- at least you'll never sound pretentious. She also tackles gender-neutral language, and the proper usage of other punctuation marks -- commas, hyphens, dashes, semicolons, colons, and apostrophes, the last of which may be going the way of "whom." 

Norris also relieves the grammar hammer with discussions of writing instruments (for copy editing, she favors #1 pencils), a tour of the world’s only pencil-sharpener museum, and other personal tidbits. (Warning, this book is not for those without humor.)

Finally, she offers an appendix of books she has found useful, and for which she provides often-hilarious notations such as: "not for use in an emergency," "useful . . . if you need to know how to address a baronet," and "defines Internet abbreviations . . . for oldsters, and debunks many a myth while promoting many another." 

***

Review of: Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen

Author: Mary Norris

Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company

Grade: A

Source: Dallas Public Library

No word nerd can fail to be intrigued by Mary Norris's memoir of her alphabetic adventures in Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen. Add that this longtime copy editor of The New Yorker's alphabet of choice is Greek -- preferably ancient, that it inspired her to enact Euripides (in the original language), find her feminist role model in the goddess Athena, and ditch her clothes to swim in the reputedly-beautifying waters of Aphrodite's bath, and Norris is guaranteed to charm lovers of mythology, literature and all things Greek as well.

And to think it all began with Sean Connery. . . or at least a showing of the Terry Gilliam movie Time Bandits.

"One scene, set in ancient Greece, featured Sean Connery in a cameo as Agamemnon," Norris writes. "He was dueling with a warrior who wore the head of a bull and looked like the Minotaur. The landscape was so stark and arid, and so enhanced by the mighty figure of Sean Connery in armor, that I wanted to go there right away." Overlooking "the screenwriters' twist of mythology" (and that the scenes purportedly in Greece were actually shot in Morocco), Norris took up the study of modern Greek to aid her travels, only to find herself falling headlong into the language's ancient version. 

Along the way, she will trace the origins of the English alphabet through the Greek, reconsider her own family's trials in the light of classical playwrights’ interpretations, sympathize with builders of a Parthenon reconstruction in Tennessee, and fend off (or not) the advances of men toward a woman traveling alone. Finally, the appendix of Greek to Me lists the letters of the Greek alphabet with their English equivalents to aid readers like me who delight in transliterating the multiple examples of the language sprinkled throughout the book.