A Few Good Reads

Two more weeks of summer means two more weeks of summer reading. Here are four stories worth sharing.

The Grammarian's Five Daughters is a modern fairy tale by Eleanor Arnason about love, self-discovery, and parts of speech:

Once there was a grammarian who lived in a great city that no longer exists, so we don't have to name it. Although she was learned and industrious and had a house full of books, she did not prosper. To make the situation worse, she had five daughters. ...

And from there, it's one elegantly rendered surprise after another. (Via Language Hat, who called the story "a little too faux-fairytale for me." I like it just fine. Also see this post by Ben Zimmer, which uses the fable as a springboard for a discussion of prepositions, "the connecting tissue of language.")

Helen DeWitt, an author previously unknown to me but now of great interest (she wrote The Last Samurai, which has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie but may become a movie of its own), has written a long, furious, and riveting post about her struggles with a New York publisher to maintain her idiosyncratic punctuation and capitalization style. No can do, the in-house editors told her, sighing regretfully; it's Chicago Manual of Style or nothing:

I explain: Look, these are two characters obsessed with numbers. The Chicago Manual of Style does not have a rule for using numerals in texts about characters obsessed with numbers because THIS BOOK HAD NOT BEEN WRITTEN when they last drew up the Chicago Manual of Style. They could not ANTICIPATE the need for a rule because the book did not then exist. I WROTE THE BOOK so I am obviously in a better position to decide what usage is correct for its characters than a group of people in Chicago who have NEVER SEEN IT.

I'm all for scrupulous editing, but I agree: this is prescriptivism beyond reason. (Via Our Bold Hero.)

Jacob Rubin, writing in Slate, reflects on the overuse of exclamation points. A new email style guide endorses them; Rubin remains skeptical. (By the way, did you know that some scholars believe the exclamation point derives from Latin io, meaning "exclamation of joy"? More on that at Neatorama.)

And finally: My Israeli grandmother used to read the Jewish Daily Forward in Yiddish, but I'll bet she never read anything like "Carrot and Shtick" by David Kaufmann in the newly hip English-language edition of that venerable paper:

It seems like a good time to pose a question that has been plaguing me for months: If Michael Landon and Kirk Douglas are Jews, why can’t we claim Bugs Bunny as well?

Makes sense to me. (Hat tip to MJF.)

Comments

[Helen DeWitt]

I think one problem was, the production manager had majored in film studies -- in other words, had not spent a lot of time thinking about texts. So she assigned to the CMOS a prescriptivist force which the CMOS does not claim for itself. If you actually read the CMOS, it's rather like the Talmud: it doesn't simply offer rules, it offers ways of working out a good decision. But someone who is nervous about the whole idea of working something out, who really just wants a hard-and-fast rule, will feel safest falling back on the simplest version of what the CMOS might be taken to say. Because they think following hard-and-fast rules is an end in itself, the very activity of working out a decision looks suspect -- this is not the way they use the CMOS, and anyone who does (they feel) is likely to do something disgraceful.

[Nancy Friedman]

Helen: Thanks for visiting and commenting! I love your comparison of CMOS to the Talmud. And a production manager in book publishing who majored in film studies? Oy.

[Michael Wagner]

Helen DeWitt's reasoning makes great sense to me.

And now that I have read her comment to your post, I'm with you. The CMOS and the Talmud is a fitting comparison.

Keep creating...infinite games,
Mike