Of apostrophes and snakes
A man after my own heart:
"Apostrophes, however, I love with all my heart. I support the correctly used apostrophe with that kind of fierce emotional investment in an irrelevance that most people reserve for football. (Go the team in the forthcoming thing, mind you.) I know punctuation rules well, derive a lamentably high percentage of my self-esteem from that knowledge and feel, again with my heart not my brain, that I'm a higher form of life than people who have either forgotten those rules or never been taught them."
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2 comments:
Ah, but is that a misused hyphen in his very next paragraph? And I confess, I'm not sure yet that it's legit to place an entire sentence within parentheses, outside of any other sentence.
But gee I laughed at the big-eared spaniels. Thanks!
misused hyphen
Do you mean the em-dash in the paragraph beginning "So my heart should be warmed"? If so, I don't think it is a misuse, since although a comma would have sufficed, using the stronger em-dash more clearly signals the break between his two points.
I'm not sure yet that it's legit to place an entire sentence within parentheses, outside of any other sentence.
I used to think so too (and rarely use this construction myself), but when I picked up a friend for using it, he was able to point to numerous examples from a wide variety of publishers (Australian, British and American) which obviously allowed this kind of thing. It can at times be useful.
That said, the editors of the Grauniad don't necessarily have a reputation for copy-checking perfection.
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