Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Eats, Shoots and Leaves

We all have something about ourselves that we believe makes us unique in that circus-freak kind of way. For me, it is grammar. This should not be a surprise to anyone who has ever spent more than 15 minutes with me. Karen called me at work yesterday with a simple apostrophe question and was subjected to a five-minute inquiry while I tried to determine whether she meant "theres" as a plural or contraction of "there is." Since I don't want anyone's brain to explode, I won't explain why the word could not have been a possessive, though in most apostrophe-"S" questions, that is also an option.

Every time I go to the laundromat, I fight the temptation to take a bottle of Wite-Out to the sign on the door listing the "Hour's." I cringe when people begin a sentence with "hopefully." That particular adverb means that the action of a sentence was carried out in a hopeful manner, not that one hopes that the action of the sentence will transpire. Last week, I finally pointed out to someone at work, after two years, that the school's enrollment agreements should read "who resides at," not "whom resides at." Rule of thumb: use "who" before verbs and "whom" before nouns or pronouns. Isn't that easier than trying to figure out objective and subjective pronouns? The rule works for all but the most convoluted sentences.

According to this London Reuters article, I'm not alone in my freakish attention to grammar. There is at least one other person in this world who can spot a misplaced comma at 50 yards and is overcome with a desire to correct it. She wrote Eats, Shoots and Leaves. The reporter explains the joke at the end of the article if you can't see the humor of the book's title right off.

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