Essential office décor

I've just received a packet of posters to grace the walls in my office. They're all grammar and spelling-related.

The idea is that I can save my vocal cords by silently pointing to the appropriate poster(s). In extremis I can photograph the relevant bit and mail the snaps to the student… or colleague.

It's a shame that we have to spend so much time on basic literacy: clearly some schools are failing. It's not just pedantry - English is a stunningly flexible and subtle language, so an inability to utilise it well limits intelligent people to a horrendous degree. Get the basics right, then move on to the complex ideas you're trying to express.

A new addiction

Everyone watching the lunar eclipse tonight?

Meanwhile, you may like this snarky, pedantic website, picking up Facebook spelling and grammatical errors. Not being in FB, I like it a lot.

Grammar Nazi

I share a look, birthday, tailor and opinions with David Mitchell. In light of my previous apostrophe comment, I thought I should post this. I really am like this.

Are you Staring at my Performative Quotation Marks? (Or, What Academics Do)

When I'm not writing exciting lectures about East Francian vowel shifts (wait till tomorrow, Intro to Lit 2 kids), I'm tackling the big issues in literary studies.

I'm not alone. Some fearless intellectual voyagers are pondering the fundamentals (you might say the colon) of our craft. What treasure do they find?

Quotation marks are ‘queer’, both denoting authority and authenticity, and questioning the status of what passes for natural. They mark performance, although post-structuralism has exploded such distinctions as natural and performed. Most of this section is a study of the lyric and danced memory routines of Bill Jones, whose poses are the physical equivalent of quotations which trouble the distinction between first and third persons and equivocate history, truth, sincerity, sexual identity, and any single ideological position. This equivocation is particularly embodied in the following Joycean and performative chapter, rich in formal experimentation and literary and critical allusion in its play on ‘sem;erot;ics’ and ‘colon:zat;ions’. The final chapter, ‘Cyberpunktuations’ represents the ultimate transformation of the punctuation mark into a visual and affective performance. Electronic communication is ironically one of the most tangible and graphological in its transformation of punctuation marks into emoticons.

Comments open for your scorn… I understand this stuff, and I still think it's, well, not much cop. (Much of it won't be news to you students either, as you all seem to be very much 'post-punctuation').

Out-nerded

You know I have a low tolerance for misplaced apostrophes. That's nothing.

Maximum respect, ladies and gentlemen, for "The Blog Of Unnecessary Quotation Marks" (did you see what I did there?).

Cultural Cringe

This is very unfair on Mr Holland, but…

I've just finished his medieval history, Millennium. It's wide-ranging, thought-provoking and works well because it has a strong narrative sweep. Yet two things stick in my brain about it. Firstly (as I said before), Wales is stamped 'England', which is ignorant. Secondly, every phrase is expressed in American English, such as 'meet with'.

I've no objection to American English. Many of my books are written by Americans and published there. I don't expect them to publish UK-English editions because I respect the cultural context of the book's origin. However, Tom Holland is a British historian, published in Britain by a British publisher. So the presence of Americanism's suggests that the publisher's ideal audience is the American market, and that American readers are so stupid that they won't understand even the minor variations of UK English.

I know this is trivial, but it's really annoying. Why not respect your home audience and your American one? Unless Mr. Holland is so cosmopolitan that he writes in American…

My thought's on apostrophes'

Cynical Ben has reached the giddy heights of blogging fame: somebody he doesn't know personally has listed him on their blogroll (there's a fortuitous word invented by Americans with little grasp of colloquial English). 

As usual, he's written rather a lot of good sense over there, and seems to want to goad me into ranting about Birmingham Council's attack on apostrophes. However, this piece of news merely depressed me and confirmed my suspicion that the world is being run by my students, who have prosecuted their own war on grammar for many years. Let's be clearly: apostrophes distinguish alternative meanings. However, I do remember proposing a lucrative little business: sheets of self-adhesive apostrophes of varying sizes and fonts handily packaged for the mobile grammatarian. Now Ben's inspired a name: Stickler's Stickers. Any backers?

I do like his vision of me as a man 'marking the world's biggest essay'. I award the world an E on current performance.