EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES

The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

by Lynne Truss

Main page, here                     

BAD COMMA

by LOUIS MENAND

Lynne Truss’s strange grammar.

Issue of 2004-06-28
Posted 2004-06-21

The first punctuation mistake in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it’s hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.

The foreword, by Frank McCourt, contains another comma-free nonrestrictive clause (“I feel no such sympathy for the manager of my local supermarket who must have a cellarful of apostrophes he doesn’t know what to do with”) and a superfluous ellipsis. The preface, by Truss, includes a misplaced apostrophe (“printers’ marks”) and two misused semicolons: one that separates unpunctuated items in a list and one that sets off a dependent clause. About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes. Sometimes, phrases such as “of course” are set off by commas; sometimes, they are not. Doubtful, distracting, and unwarranted commas turn up in front of restrictive phrases (“Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions”), before correlative conjunctions (“Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t”), and in prepositional phrases (“including biblical names, and any foreign name with an unpronounced final ‘s’”). Where you most expect punctuation, it may not show up at all: “You have to give initial capitals to the words Biro and Hoover otherwise you automatically get tedious letters from solicitors.”

Parentheses are used, wrongly, to add independent clauses to the ends of sentences: “I bought a copy of Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage and covered it in sticky-backed plastic so that it would last a lifetime (it has).” Citation form varies: one passage from the Bible is identified as “Luke, xxiii, 43” and another, a page later, as “Isaiah xl, 3.” The word “abuzz” is printed with a hyphen, which it does not have. We are informed that when a sentence ends with a quotation American usage always places the terminal punctuation inside the quotation marks, which is not so. (An American would not write “Who said ‘I cannot tell a lie?’”) A line from “My Fair Lady” is misquoted (“The Arabs learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning”). And it is stated that The New Yorker, “that famously punctilious periodical,” renders “the nineteen-eighties” as the “1980’s,” which it does not. The New Yorker renders “the nineteen-eighties” as “the nineteen-eighties.”

Then, there is the translation problem. For some reason, the folks at Gotham Books elected not to make any changes for the American edition, a typesetting convenience that makes the book virtually useless for American readers. As Truss herself notes, some conventions of British usage employed in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” are taboo in the United States—for example, the placement of commas and periods outside quotation marks, “like this”. The book also omits the serial comma, as in “eats, shoots and leaves,” which is acceptable in the United States only in newspapers and commercial magazines. The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces. Some of Truss’s departures from punctuation norms are just British laxness. In a book that pretends to be all about firmness, though, this is not a good excuse. The main rule in grammatical form is to stick to whatever rules you start out with, and the most objectionable thing about Truss’s writing is its inconsistency. Either Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor. Still, the book has been a No. 1 best-seller in both England and the United States.

"I am not a grammarian,” Truss says. No quarrel there. Although she has dug up information about things like the history of the colon, Truss is so uninterested in the actual rules of punctuation that she even names the ones she flouts—for example, the rule that semicolons cannot be used to set off dependent clauses. (Unless you are using it to disambiguate items in a list, a semicolon should be used only between independent clauses—that is, clauses that can stand as complete sentences on their own.) That is the rule, she explains, but she violates it frequently. She thinks this makes her sound like Virginia Woolf. And she admits that her editors are continually removing the commas that she tends to place before conjunctions.

Why would a person who is not just vague about the rules but disinclined to follow them bother to produce a guide to punctuation? Truss, a former sports columnist for the London Times, appears to have been set a-blaze by two obsessions: superfluous apostrophes in commercial signage (“Potatoe’s” and that sort of thing) and the elision of punctuation, along with uppercase letters, in e-mail messages. Are these portents of the night, soon coming, in which no man can read? Truss warns us that they are—“If we value the way we have been trained to think by centuries of absorbing the culture of the printed word, we must not allow the language to return to the chaotic scriptio continua swamp from which it so bravely crawled less than two thousand years ago”—but it’s hard to know how seriously to take her, because her prose is so caffeinated that you can’t always separate the sense from the sensibility. And that, undoubtedly, is the point, for it is the sensibility, the “I’m mad as hell” act, that has got her her readers. A characteristic passage:

For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.

Some people do feel this way, and they do not wish to be handed the line that “language is always evolving,” or some other slice of liberal pie. They don’t even want to know what the distinction between a restrictive and a non-restrictive clause might be. They are like people who lose control when they hear a cell phone ring in a public place: they just need to vent. Truss is their Jeremiah. They don’t care where her commas are, because her heart is in the right place.

Though she has persuaded herself otherwise, Truss doesn’t want people to care about correctness. She wants them to care about writing and about using the full resources of the language. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” is really a “decline of print culture” book disguised as a style manual (poorly disguised). Truss has got things mixed up because she has confused two aspects of writing: the technological and the aesthetic. Writing is an instrument that was invented for recording, storing, and communicating. Using the relatively small number of symbols on the keyboard, you can record, store, and communicate a virtually infinite range of information, and encode meanings with virtually any degree of complexity. The system works entirely by relationships—the relationship of one symbol to another, of one word to another, of one sentence to another. The function of most punctuation—commas, colons and semicolons, dashes, and so on—is to help organize the relationships among the parts of a sentence. Its role is semantic: to add precision and complexity to meaning. It increases the information potential of strings of words.

What most punctuation does not do is add color, texture, or flavor to the writing. Those are all things that belong to the aesthetics, and literary aesthetics are weirdly intangible. You can’t taste writing. It has no color and makes no sound. Its shape has no significance. But people say that someone’s prose is “colorful” or “pungent” or “shapeless” or “lyrical.” When written language is decoded, it seems to trigger sensations that are unique to writing but that usually have to be described by analogy to some other activity. When deli owners put up signs that read “‘Iced’ Tea,” the single quotation marks are intended to add extraliterary significance to the message, as if they were the grammatical equivalent of red ink. Truss is quite clear about the role played by punctuation in making words mean something. But she also—it is part of her general inconsistency—suggests that semicolons, for example, signal readers to pause. She likes to animate her punctuation marks, to talk about the apostrophe and the dash as though they were little cartoon characters livening up the page. She is anthropomorphizing a technology. It’s a natural thing to do. As she points out, in earlier times punctuation did a lot more work than it does today, and some of the work involved adjusting the timing in sentences. But this is no longer the norm, and trying to punctuate in that spirit now only makes for ambiguity and annoyance.

One of the most mysterious of writing’s immaterial properties is what people call “voice.” Editors sometimes refer to it, in a phrase that underscores the paradox at the heart of the idea, as “the voice on the page.” Prose can show many virtues, including originality, without having a voice. It may avoid cliché, radiate conviction, be grammatically so clean that your grandmother could eat off it. But none of this has anything to do with this elusive entity the “voice.” There are probably all kinds of literary sins that prevent a piece of writing from having a voice, but there seems to be no guaranteed technique for creating one. Grammatical correctness doesn’t insure it. Calculated incorrectness doesn’t, either. Ingenuity, wit, sarcasm, euphony, frequent outbreaks of the first-person singular—any of these can enliven prose without giving it a voice. You can set the stage as elaborately as you like, but either the phantom appears or it doesn’t.

When it does appear, the subject is often irrelevant. “I do not care for movies very much and I rarely see them,” W. H. Auden wrote to the editors of The Nation in 1944. “Further, I am suspicious of criticism as the literary genre which, more than any other, recruits epigones, pedants without insight, intellectuals without love. I am all the more surprised, therefore, to find myself not only reading Mr. Agee before I read anyone else in The Nation but also consciously looking forward all week to reading him again.” A lot of the movies that James Agee reviewed between 1942 and 1948, when he was The Nation’s film critic, were negligible then and are forgotten now. But you can still read his columns with pleasure. They continue to pass the ultimate test of good writing: it is more painful to stop reading them than it is to keep going. When you get to the end of Agee’s sentences, you wish, like Auden, that there were more sentences.

Writing that has a voice is writing that has something like a personality. But whose personality is it? As with all art, there is no straight road from the product back to the producer. There are writers loved for their humor who are not funny people, and writers admired for their eloquence who swallow their words, never look you in the eye, and can’t seem to finish a sentence. Wisdom on the page correlates with wisdom in the writer about as frequently as a high batting average correlates with a high I.Q.: they just seem to have very little to do with one another. Witty and charming people can produce prose of sneering sententiousness, and fretful neurotics can, to their readers, seem as though they must be delightful to live with. Personal drabness, through some obscure neural kink, can deliver verbal blooms. Readers who meet a writer whose voice they have fallen in love with usually need to make a small adjustment afterward in order to hang on to the infatuation.

The uncertainty about what it means for writing to have a voice arises from the metaphor itself. Writers often claim that they never write something that they would not say. It is hard to know how this could be literally true. Speech is somatic, a bodily function, and it is accompanied by physical inflections—tone of voice, winks, smiles, raised eyebrows, hand gestures—that are not reproducible in writing. Spoken language is repetitive, fragmentary, contradictory, limited in vocabulary, loaded down with space holders (“like,” “um,” “you know”)—all the things writing teachers tell students not to do. And yet people can generally make themselves understood right away. As a medium, writing is a million times weaker than speech. It’s a hieroglyph competing with a symphony.

The other reason that speech is a bad metaphor for writing is that writing, for ninety-nine per cent of people who do it, is the opposite of spontaneous. Some writers write many drafts of a piece; some write one draft, at the pace of a snail after a night on the town. But chattiness, slanginess, in-your-face-ness, and any other features of writing that are conventionally characterized as “like speech” are usually the results of laborious experimentation, revision, calibration, walks around the block, unnecessary phone calls, and recalibration. Writers, by nature, tend to be people in whom l’esprit de l’escalier is a recurrent experience: they are always thinking of the perfect riposte after the moment for saying it has passed. So they take a few years longer and put it in print. Writers are not mere copyists of language; they are polishers, embellishers, perfecters. They spend hours getting the timing right—so that what they write sounds completely unrehearsed.

Does this mean that the written “voice” is never spontaneous and natural but always an artificial construction of language? This is not a proposition that most writers could accept. The act of writing is personal; it feels personal. The unfunny person who is a humorous writer does not think, of her work, “That’s not really me.” Critics speak of “the persona,” a device for compelling, in the interests of licensing the interpretative impulse, a divorce between author and text. But no one, or almost no one, writes “as a persona.” People write as people, and if there were nothing personal about the result few human beings would try to manufacture it for a living. Composition is a troublesome, balky, sometimes sleep-depriving business. What makes it especially so is that the rate of production is beyond the writer’s control. You have to wait, and what you are waiting for is something inside you to come up with the words. That something, for writers, is the voice.

A better basis than speaking for the metaphor of voice in writing is singing. You can’t tell if someone can sing or not from the way she talks, and although “natural phrasing” and “from the heart” are prized attributes of song, singing that way requires rehearsal, preparation, and getting in touch with whatever it is inside singers that, by a neural kink or the grace of God, enables them to turn themselves into vessels of musical sound. Truss is right (despite what she preaches) when she implies, by her own practice, that the rules really don’t have that much to do with it. Before Luciano Pavarotti walked onstage at the opera house, he was in the habit of taking a bite of an apple. That’s how he helped his voice to sound spontaneous and natural.

What writers hear when they are trying to write is something more like singing than like speaking. Inside your head, you’re yakking away to yourself all the time. Getting that voice down on paper is a depressing experience. When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music. This writing voice is the voice that people are surprised not to encounter when they “meet the writer.” The writer is not so surprised. Writers labor constantly under the anxiety that this voice, though they have found it a hundred times before, has disappeared forever, and that they will never hear it again. Some writers, when they begin a new piece, spend hours rereading their old stuff, trying to remember how they did it, what it’s supposed to sound like. This rarely works; nothing works reliably. Sooner or later, usually later than everyone involved would have preferred, the voice shows up, takes a bite of the apple, and walks onstage.

Reads, Chortles, & Smirks
Why nobody's learning anything from Lynne Truss.

By Timothy Noah

Posted Wednesday, June 16, 2004, at 8:31 AM PT

Curious to see what made a book about punctuation so compelling that it topped the New York Times best-seller list (this week it dropped to No. 2), I bought a copy of Lynne Truss' book Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Like every other American-bred Anglophile, I'm always willing to subject myself to a British spanking for misusing the Mother Tongue. I looked forward to learning about all sorts of hideous errors that Slate's editors have allowed me to commit over the years.

There weren't any. I intend no personal or collective smugness. It's just that, in reading Truss' book, I was struck by the extreme simplicity of punctuation rules, at least to a native speaker. I know 'em all. You do too, dear reader, if you have the slightest interest in the subject. (To test yourself, try this punctuation game on Truss' Web site.) They just aren't that difficult to master.

I don't mean to suggest that the broader rules of English grammar and proper syntax are a walk in the park. As someone who has made his living for a quarter-century by writing, I must continually relearn, and refine my application of, proper English. As recently as 1997, I had to be reminded by an editor never to use "quality" as an adjective. Around the turn of the millennium, an old friend of my father's sent me an anguished e-mail asking why, oh why, must I write "for free" when the correct and much simpler usage was "free"? Sometimes I even encounter rules that I didn't merely forget, but never knew. If you're well-educated in English usage and you want a humbling experience, dip into Robert Graves' and Alan Hodge's pathologically exacting manual The Reader Over Your Shoulder.

I did learn a few things from Truss' book about the differences between British and American punctuation. I'd never before noticed, for instance, that they like their periods outside the quotation marks, which is more logical but less pleasing to the eye. And I picked up a little history. I will henceforth lower my head respectfully whenever I hear the name Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450-1515), because he invented the italic typeface and printed the first semicolon. (His grandson Aldus Manutius the Younger also played a role in these events, and, as with the father-and-son landscapers named Frederick Law Olmsted, nobody much bothers to distinguish between the two.)

But, let's face it. Punctuation isn't hard or particularly complex. It's only with some effort—mostly the interjection of lots and lots of jokes—that Truss is able to make her book stretch to 204 pages. I don't dispute Truss' contention that people violate basic rules of punctuation on a regular basis and that the results can be maddening. Even educated people botch them. Even people who graduated with high honors from the finest universities in the world. The question is why.

Some people botch their punctuation because they lack a proper education, typically because they lack sufficient money to acquire one. Some of them botch it because English is their second language, and you never know your second language as well as your first. But the bulk of them don't know because they don't care. I wish they did, but they don't. And unless they plan on earning their living as writers, it isn't likely to hold them back very much, if at all.

This brings me back to the question I started with. How did Eats, Shoots & Leaves land on the best-seller list? I'd like to think it reveals a late-blooming hunger for self-improvement by the ignorant masses. Somehow, though, I doubt it. Truss certainly doesn't seem to be addressing such people as her readers. "What happened to punctuation?" she wails. "Why is it so disregarded when it is self-evidently so useful in preventing enormous mix-ups?" This isn't what Henry Higgins would say to Eliza Doolittle. It's what Higgins would say to Col. Pickering, his linguist sidekick. Truss wants you to read her book not to learn the rules of punctuation but to join her  in bewailing, as you review these rules, the sorry ignorance of those who don't know them. It's to feel superior, and smug, and, well, almost … English. This last doesn't explain its success in England, but don't underestimate its appeal in America. Truss' book should be titled Reads, Chortles, & Smirks. Rather than read it, I recommend you pick up a book about something you don't know much about. Everyone is ignorant about something.

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate.
 

The war of the commas

Eats, Shoots & Leaves is selling like hot cakes in the US and one eminent New York critic is not happy

John Mullan
Friday July 2, 2004
The Guardian

The only surprise is that something like this did not come sooner. Write about grammar, of which punctuation is but one elaborate and beautiful part, and you open yourself to attack. You always take the risk that your medium will undo your message. Write a book whose subtitle is The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation and you invite a little of that laudable intolerance upon yourself. When your book has sold more than 1.5m copies, the invitation becomes irresistible.

As well as its massive sales - a complete surprise to author and publisher - Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves enjoyed a critically friendly reception in Britain. The reviewers themselves liked to be thought of as "people who love punctuation and get upset about it" (the book's description of its intended audience). High-profile curmudgeons such as John Humphrys recommended it. But now a fellow "stickler" (Truss's name for those who truly care about punctuation) has taken the author of this surprise bestseller to task for her own grammatical failures. In a long article in the New Yorker, Louis Menand condemns and attempts to anatomise Truss's "strange grammar". So inaccurate or incorrect is Truss's punctuation, he says, that "it's hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax". He continues in the same withering vein: "Either Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor."

Menand writes with the borrowed authority of a magazine that is renowned for its code of "correctness", in matters both of fact and of style. As he explains (and those acquainted with American journalism might recognise this), "The British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters ... than Americans are." So British readers are hardly likely to object to Truss's "British laxness". According to Menand, "About half the semicolons in the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes." Unless a semicolon is dividing items in a list, he explains, it should be used only between clauses that can stand as complete sentences. Truss not only flouts this rule, she shamelessly tells the reader that she is doing so.

You can hardly blame Menand for hugging himself when he finds the first mistake at the book's very beginning, in its dedication. Here, he delightedly discovers, "a nonrestrictive clause [that] is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there." Does he have a point? He feels no need to tell the New Yorker's notoriously literate readers what a non-restrictive (I like a hyphen there, myself) clause is, but, to judge his attack, you'll need to know. Truss's dedication mentions "the striking Bolshevik printers of St Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters". To put it simply, Menand says that there should be a comma after "Petersburg". Without that comma, the dedication is to some striking printers who made the demand, as opposed to some other striking printers who didn't. Only with a comma is the dedication to all the striking printers (as Truss presumably intends).

It is true that the rule about a comma before a non-restrictive clause ("The house, which is Victorian, is dilapidated.") and not before a restrictive clause ("The house that I own is dilapidated.") is there in Fowler's The King's English but is not mentioned in Truss's book. Some of Menand's other points seem less like hits. He complains about a misplaced apostrophe in "printers' marks", but couldn't the printers be plural? He complains of inconsistency. "Sometimes, phrases such as 'of course' are set off by commas; sometimes, they are not." (Would you use those two commas, by the way?) But inconsistency might simply be appropriate variety. He complains that Truss uses parentheses to add independent clauses to the end of sentences (so do I, sometimes).

The New Yorker does not encourage letters of rejoinder, but Andrew Franklin, Truss's editor at her publishers, Profile Books, is happy to answer back. He is not to be outdone in witheringness by Louis Menand. The problem is mostly the critic's humourlessness. "If you have no sense of humour", Franklin thinks, the success of Truss's book will be a mystery to you. Misunderstanding the purpose of her book, which is not a style guide but an entertaining "call to arms", Menand has pedantically reached for a non-existent rule book. "I think he's a tosser. You're welcome to use that," Franklin remarked when I quizzed him for his views on Truss's antagonist. "I'd never want to spend an evening in his company." Rules in English "are more complicated and sophisticated" than he can dream of, he adds. Good writers can break the rules, provided they have learned them before they break them.

Why should it have so provoked one of the New Yorker's leading writers? "A twisted colon" is one of Franklin's explanations, but he also has a weightier cultural analysis. The attack is "deeply xenophobic". An American critic who is used to his readers having their eyes only on American culture has seen them reach for an idiosyncratic English book for a discussion of grammar. So far the book has sold 800,000 copies in the US, about as many as it has sold in Britain. For the arbiter of matters literary and linguistic in the New Yorker chair, it is, Franklin guesses, just too much.

Menand certainly has one explicit objection to the book's Englishness. He points out that it has not been altered for its American edition, and is "virtually useless for American readers". They order things differently over there. Quotation marks always go outside stops. And the title of Truss's book, according to American grammatical mores, should have a comma before the "&": Eats, Shoots, & Leaves. So are those American readers poor saps, duped into buying a guide to a language they do not write? Franklin retorts that the "trivial differences" between British and American punctuation are mentioned by Truss, who anyway wrote a separate introduction for the US edition.

Certainly it is the case that it is Truss's breeziness, even her happy facetiousness, that has made her book a bestseller, not her description of how to use apostrophes. The book's success is all about it not being a style guide. After all, those style guides are all out there and none of their authors has ever been able to retire on the royalties from even the most helpful. It is the combination of concern with jokiness, irritating to some, that has attracted readers. Style guides list rules and conventions, but you can actually read Truss's book .

So her confessions that she breaks some rules are all to her purpose. Menand's own article turns into a meditation on the nature and the elusiveness of a writer's "voice", and a voice is what - for good or ill - Truss manages to give you. Menand says that a writer's voice has nothing to do with his or her punctuation, but his own prose has a voice that is certainly, in part, a function of his punctuation. He combines colloquial idioms and contractions with a certain fastidiousness - some might think fussiness - in his use of commas. (Look back at that earlier example.)

Funnily enough, this is something Truss talks about in her book. Her chapter on commas begins by examining the famous "clarification complex" of a past editor of the New Yorker, Harold Ross. Ross was always trying to get contributors to use more commas and admitted in a letter to HL Mencken that he had "carried editing to a very high degree of fussiness here, probably to a point approaching the ultimate". He itched to put in commas wherever he could. Perhaps Menand has inherited the itch, and perhaps it is a matter of taste and not correctness.

John Mullan teaches English at University College London.
 

You pour thing, if you don't see the point of spelling correctly
By Lynne Truss
(Filed: 08/07/2004)

More miserable news about language, then. More reason to pop off to the nearest wall and bang our heads against it. According to the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary, half the people using it these days are stumped by the difference between "reign" and "rein", and "pouring" and "poring".

However, before we start to share out our cyanide capsules, perhaps we should pause. I, for one, am heartened to hear that people are looking things up in dictionaries at all. Over the past few months, I have been told repeatedly that "everyone" now relies on spell-checker programs, just as they rely on grammar checkers for their punctuation.

Whenever I have pointed out that spell-checkers are inferior to dictionaries because, when you look up a word in a dictionary, you get a definition as well, I have met with pitying looks. Yet evidently - Hooray! - there are still a few people willing to drag that heavy tome off the shelf and discover that "pour" may sound very much like "pore", but is actually a completely different word.

Does it matter that people spell correctly? Well, the pour/pore example is a pretty good place to start, actually. Write, "I have been pouring over my books" and you will find it leads to tricky extra questions, such as, "Pouring what?"

Yet there is an idea steadily gathering force in this country that communication should be judged only by functional effectiveness and that, if you "get the gist" of what someone is saying, this is enough. Notions of "correct" English are for fuddy-duddies who take nasty pleasure in other people's mistakes.

Not surprisingly, I am not persuaded by this argument. In fact, it makes me weep and thunder by turns. "Please don't use the expression 'Get the gist'!" I pray, whenever I have to engage in chat-show debate with the latest person advocating the liberating joy of a grammatical free-for-all.

But they always do. "Ah, but does it matter, so long as we get the gist?" they ask, as if saying something original and profound. "Is conveying a gist the highest aim of language?" I ask (sometimes a bit emotionally). "Correct me if I'm wrong, but cavemen pointing and grunting got the bloody gist!"

The other idea gathering force is that the written word is a mere adjunct to speech - which is a rather serious development for those of us who were brought up to worship books, and instinctively regard the hierarchy as the other way round. Yet it's an unignorable fact: when e-mailing and texting, people use a hybrid form of language that is half-talking, half-writing. Hence the decline of punctuation; hence all this annoying "gist" talk; and hence the universal cavalier disregard for spelling.

There is a huge irony here, sadly. Thanks to a miraculous new technology, more people are writing more stuff than ever before. Yet, through a combination of bad education and misguided egalitarianism, the lower the standard of written communication, the better it is perceived to be.

A lot of nonsense is talked about "proper" English being a means of endorsing the existing social status quo. My feeling is that the opposite is true. If you encourage people to write the way they talk, class divisions are ultimately reinforced, even exacerbated. I'm a working-class girl who read a lot of books and grew up to - well, to write this piece in The Telegraph anyway, so maybe I have an old-fashioned view of education as the instrument of social mobility. But it's pretty clear to anyone that, if children are taught that "getting the gist" is sufficient, everyone stays where they are.

Last weekend, the comedian Bill Cosby sent a very blunt message to the patois-speakers of the black community, to the same effect: "Civil rights campaigners marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education and now we've got these knuckleheads who can't speak English… Everybody knows it's important to speak English… You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth."

Doesn't it drive you nuts, all this? The argument goes that the spelling of English words is, by and large, "irrational". Why is there a silent "p" in "receipt" and not in "deceit"? Well, the quick answer is: life's a pain sometimes; stop whining; if you don't like it, go and speak German. In any case, if you try to reform the spelling of English along "rational" lines, you discover quite quickly that there is no way of doing it.

It seems to me that people just resent having to learn things. "How do you explain to an eight-year-old that the word 'yacht' has all these strange letters in it?" a chap once asked me, on the Jeremy Vine Show. This seemed an unanswerable question at the time. It was only afterwards that I worked out my objection to it. Why should the comprehension level of an eight-year-old be our standard for anything?

Personally, I have spelling blind spots, just as I have grammar blind spots - and when they are pointed out to me, I am mortified. That's the way it ought to be, I reckon. On the other hand, however, I am not ashamed at all of thinking that the conventions of the written word (spelling, grammar, punctuation) need to be protected against the barbarians.

Yesterday, as I was travelling by car between Manchester and Leeds, the driver offered to stop at a newsagent's, but as he slowed, I said: "No, look, it says 'stationary' with an A; we'll go somewhere else." He laughed politely, but I wasn't joking.

Perhaps the answer is to carry a stack of Concise OEDs, and deliver them personally, to show shopkeepers that "stationery" has an E. Or, if feelings are running particularly high, tie a Concise OED to a brick and heave it through the window. Either way, one mournfully suspects, they still might not get the gist.

Lynne Truss is the author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, published by Profile Books