430-499: Most. Unmotivating. Dewey. Section. Ever. Just 70 digits of language dictionaries, 60 of them allocated to various European languages. So imagine my pleasant surprise at finding that my old friend Leo Rosten wound up amongst the Germans! I knew Rosten from his wonderful character, H*Y*M*A*N*K*A*P*L*A*N, a fictional adult ESL student whose personality was as colorful as his signature. But Rosten was fluent in Yiddish as well as English and wrote a wonderfully schlocky (see what I did there?) guide to Yiddish as spoken in America by Jews and goyim alike, and that is how he ended up in 430-439.
Some people object to the jokes that were old before Rosten was even born. Others might object to outdated social attitudes. Myself, I just found out that even Leo Rosten cannot persuade me to read an entire dictionary front to back in a period of three to six weeks. But, as dictionaries go, this is a good one! And his kids have updated it, so, there's that. If you want to learn some Yiddish, this is the way to do it!
Sunday, December 24, 2017
Sunday, December 10, 2017
420-429: English. Eats, Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss
On the back cover of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a panda walks into a bar... and by the time he walks out, everyone has vowed to be much more careful about the placement of their commas. And their apostrophes, and even their ellipses! Truss surprised herself by writing a best seller about punctuation, and then took it to the next level by issuing a special edition equipped with a "punctuation repair kit" for the correction of any errant signage one might find in the wild: sticker commas, question marks, and, when all is lost, cute little circles that admonish, "THE PANDA SAYS NO!" (Just... no. Stop with your banana's and pretty, little, green houses already.)
There is a 10-page preface and a 34-page introduction. At least one of these, and possibly both, is disposable. But once you get into the meat of the book, the considerations of proper uses of each of the marks, you will find plenty of food for thought. The text is embellished with many examples of punctuation gone wild ("Giant Kid's Playground" is one of my favorites. Odd how the equipment all seemed normal-sized...).
The most impressive thing I learned is that there is no complete consensus on the proper use of commas!! This revelation has pretty much ruined my professional life. I used to confidently pronounce rules like, "A subordinate clause must be set off by a comma if it introduces the main clause, but not if it follows it," and, of course, "never use a comma before a coordinating conjunction unless it could be replaced with a semicolon," but it turns out those are both style choices, not natural laws along the lines of "multiplication undoes division" or "an object in motion tends to stay in motion." Snap! Now I just tell kids, "These are the rules being tested. You may have learned different rules. Your rules are not wrong, but you will lose credit if you follow them in this situation!" Welcome to reality.
And, if you still can't figure it out, apparently you can just ask the panda.
There is a 10-page preface and a 34-page introduction. At least one of these, and possibly both, is disposable. But once you get into the meat of the book, the considerations of proper uses of each of the marks, you will find plenty of food for thought. The text is embellished with many examples of punctuation gone wild ("Giant Kid's Playground" is one of my favorites. Odd how the equipment all seemed normal-sized...).
The most impressive thing I learned is that there is no complete consensus on the proper use of commas!! This revelation has pretty much ruined my professional life. I used to confidently pronounce rules like, "A subordinate clause must be set off by a comma if it introduces the main clause, but not if it follows it," and, of course, "never use a comma before a coordinating conjunction unless it could be replaced with a semicolon," but it turns out those are both style choices, not natural laws along the lines of "multiplication undoes division" or "an object in motion tends to stay in motion." Snap! Now I just tell kids, "These are the rules being tested. You may have learned different rules. Your rules are not wrong, but you will lose credit if you follow them in this situation!" Welcome to reality.
And, if you still can't figure it out, apparently you can just ask the panda.
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