{"id":39281,"date":"2021-11-10T17:29:35","date_gmt":"2021-11-10T17:29:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/?p=39281"},"modified":"2026-03-26T09:58:27","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T13:58:27","slug":"noahs-blog-reading-copy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/2021\/noahs-blog-reading-copy\/","title":{"rendered":"Noah’s Blog – Reading Copy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Noah’s Blog – Reading Copy\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n\n\n

By Noah Bendzsa<\/a><\/em>
The Department of English Language and Literature<\/a> Student Blogger for 2021\/2022<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Would you believe\u2026<\/a> that I actually exclaimed \u201cAh-ha<\/em>!\u201d when I thought that I\u2019d spotted an error in The New Yorker<\/em>? I was out in public, and I\u2019m sure my reaction would have drawn looks, if I hadn\u2019t been in a parked car in an LCBO parking lot. (I was waiting for a friend.) The apparently offending sentence appeared in \u201cLegitimation Crisis,\u201d by Louis Menand<\/a>, and was published in the August 16, 2021, issue. It ran: \u201cIn 1966, Congress passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which empowered the federal government to set safety standards for automobiles, a matter heretofore left largely to the states\u201d (Menand, \u201cLegitimation\u201d 71).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you see it? Don\u2019t squint too hard; you won\u2019t find fault with the punctuation, and there is no egregious but invisible homophonic misspelling like \u201cno-nothingism\u201d<\/a> (see Lizza 45). The problem, I felt, was the word \u201cheretofore.\u201d The article was not published, in 1966, just after the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. My understanding, backed up by the Oxford English Dictionary, was that \u201cheretofore\u201d meant \u201cbefore now\u201d or \u201cup until this<\/em> point.\u201d As I understood it, it did not mean \u201cup until that<\/em> point\u201d\u2014which is what Menand means.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you have ever stopped reading right in the middle of a novel\u2019s action sequence to ponder a word\u2019s proper or improper usage; if you have ever paused mid-essay because of a superfluous or, more often, missing comma; if you have ever.\u2026Well, I had to crawl through the first pages of Patricia Highsmith\u2019s The Price of Salt,<\/em> because I kept getting stopped where my 2015 edition renders \u201cco-workers\u201das \u201ccow<\/em>orkers.\u201d This is what grammar and usage are like for some of us (and maybe for you, too). They have a great capacity to get us riled up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As it turns out, I hadn\u2019t spotted a mistake in Menand\u2019s work. When I got home, I realized that The New Yorker<\/em> uses Merriam-Webster\u2019s dictionaries (Norris 18), because of course they do. Oxford has been known, in the past, to merely refer readers to Webster\u2019s (see Hyman 11031) and, as Webster\u2019s itself notes, is in part responsible for the widespread, erroneous claim that Shakespeare coined x <\/em>words<\/a>, where x <\/em>is equal to 1,700 or greater. Webster\u2019s, on the other hand, tends to do the lexical heavy lifting. They are the champions of usage, telling us that, yes, \u201cfunner,\u201d \u201cconversate,\u201d and \u201cirregardless\u201d are indeed words, and you can go right ahead and use them\u2014at least, in casual settings. In their on-line dictionary, they define \u201cheretofore\u201d<\/a> as a synonym of \u201chitherto,\u201d which even Oxford defines as \u201cuntil now or until the point in time under discussion<\/em>\u201d (my emphasis). Menand means \u201cheretofore\u201d in the sense of \u201chitherto.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It would have been highly ironic if I had spotted an error in Menand\u2019s article. It was he, more than anyone else, who first turned me on to grammar and usage. In ninth grade, when I was thirteen, I still had little notion of what a verb, noun, or adjective was\u2014let alone what constituted a sentence or how to properly use a comma. In an attempt to better myself and my writing, I started reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves<\/em>, by Lynne Truss. After getting a few pages in, not realizing that it was not<\/em> a grammar and usage guide but a comedy book, I was puzzled. Even as a punctuator-by-ear, I could tell that there were many more solecisms than there ought to have been merely by chance or human error. This was a book whose title referenced a joke about the ambiguity generated by misplaced commas, and yet, in the text, there were missing and misplaced commas everywhere. Where were the copy editors? In my own na\u00efve way, I was apoplectic: I had wanted to learn something and instead was, as I read, merely tallying vague grievances of my own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As teenagers do, I turned to the Internet for someone who shared my opinion, for an expert who could precisely diagnose what was wrong, and validate what I felt. That expert was Menand. His 2004 review of <\/a>the<\/a> book<\/a>, titled \u201cBad Comma,\u201d begins, \u201cThe first punctuation mistake in \u2018Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation\u2019\u2026 appears in the dedication, where a non-restrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there\u201d (Menand 102). I\u2019ve read \u201cBad Comma\u201d in its entirety maybe six or seven times, parts of it upward of a dozen; I have never made it past chapter two of Eats, Shoots & Leaves<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this is to say that I am now, or ever was, a stickler\u2014that is, someone like Truss\u2019s popular image. Truss\u2019s narratorial voice is a part of a pervasive stereotype (maybe less pervasive in English studies) that says those who care deeply about language and grammar\u2014just as much as they do about the meaning that words and punctuation together are trying to unambiguously convey\u2014are uptight and have the irrepressible urge to correct any and all violations of language conventions. I think this originates, for most people, in primary school and older, prescriptivist systems of education, where teachers were intransigent when it came to anything but a very narrow range of usage. These people, Lynne Truss sticklers, hiss and recoil when someone uses so-called adman slang, like \u201caccessorize\u201d or \u201cprioritize\u201d; or uses \u201cimpact\u201d or \u201cloan\u201d as a verb; or ends a sentence with a preposition. Assuredly, these people will have stopped reading this by now, because I have already split at least two infinitives in this post, one in this paragraph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My anger at the mistakes in Truss\u2019s books was<\/em> the same kind of anger that she says she feels at the sight of a grocer\u2019s apostrophe (mistakenly pluralizing a word by adding an \u2019s<\/em>). But\u2014and this is important\u2014it was born out of disappointment and not out of fear or resentment; a book I believed capable of helping me, let me down. I don\u2019t maliciously correct people\u2019s usage in conversation, and I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any real need to correct minor errors in print. (Yes, it annoys me when a certain scholar writing on We Need New Names<\/em> spells \u201cBulawayo\u201d three different ways, but my thinking is, \u201cAs long as the scholarship is good\u2026\u201d) People make mistakes, and doubtless at least one grammar or usage error has slipped past me and my editor (more likely me) in the course of writing this very article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I very often, in fact, try to pay less<\/em> attention to rigid punctuation and grammar conventions, not that I have ever done this with any particular degree of success. I often wish I could write a little more like Styron, whose sense of restrictiveness is refreshingly broad. Sophie\u2019s Choice<\/em> begins with an omitted comma after an introductory clause (\u201cIn those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan\u201d [3]), and it just gets better from there. I\u2019ve also come to really like the convention up until the middle of the twentieth century of putting semicolons between complete clauses and co\u00f6rdinating conjunctions preceding complete clauses. It can give a sentence a wired, pugilistic spirit, even if Henry James is the one doing it (\u201cI slept little that night\u2014I was too much excited; and this astonished me, too\u201d [18]). And what about the British convention\u2014bad form in the United States and much of Canada\u2014of putting punctuation, like full stops and commas, outside quotation marks? Toril Moi does this so assertively that I was once helpless to not to do the same, after reading her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, there are also those writers whom none of us want to emulate. But their writing, hapless as it is, can be a lot of fun, too. That is, it can be funny, funny-ironic. This is especially true since the work is largely unimportant, the writer usually remains anonymous, and no one feels like they\u2019re the direct butt of the joke. In other words, no one gets hurt. Grocer\u2019s apostrophes, which are ubiquitous, are quaint but not funny; you almost feel that conventions will change to accommodate them, and someday soon. I\u2019m referring to bigger things, ontological<\/em> things. These sorts of things concern real<\/em> grocery stores.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was working at Loblaws, the summer of 2019, there was a sign in the lunchroom that read: \u201cWARNING: We regret that this is not an allergy free room.\u201d As I didn\u2019t care much for the building, I might have been using peanut butter after all. Many older Loblaws locations also have an ersatz Eastern European deli, complete with a red false awning. Under each awning is a sign that reads: \u201cLa Marchetta.\u201d You might innocently think that this is Italian for \u201cthe market\u201d\u2014whoever commissioned those signs certainly did. Actually, it means \u201chustler\u201d or \u201cprostitute.\u201d (The deli pictured doubles down, and a sign, on the left hand side of the frame, declares that it is located at \u201c104 Marchetta Avenue.\u201d) Who knew our grocery stores were living such full lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Compared to these\u2014what are they, faux pas? snafus?\u2014a lot of the grammar and language ambiguities on the Internet are relatively tame. However, I would be remiss if I didn\u2019t take this opportunity to point out a similar transfiguration that I\u2019ve noticed on-line, with the proliferation of writers referring to themselves as \u201cdog mom\u201ds or \u201cdog dad\u201ds. I guess it\u2019s only to be expected; after all, at one point there were an awful lot of \u201cdog lovers\u201d in cyberspace. I wonder what Menand would say about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n