Lynne Truss, possibly my favourite Grumpy Old Woman, finally has her own site.
For those who haven’t had the pleasure, Lynne is on a vendetta. Well, several, actually. In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, it’s bad punctuation. But it’s not because she’s a snob. It goes much deeper than that…
Lynne’s point is that good punctuation is part of good written communication, and good communication is a courtesy to the person you’re trying to communicate with. Using poor punctuation, poor grammar, poor spelling or whatever shows that you don’t care whether or not you are understood.
Computer programmers learn this the hard way. Expressing yourself poorly makes it much, much harder for the next person to understand (and hence maintain) your code. Chances are, the next person is you, six months later.
Talk to the Hand is an expansion on this theme. Rudeness and discourtesy seems to pervade modern life. Every time you try to call someone and end up in a call centre, who can’t deal with your problem, so they’ll put you through to the other office, oh, but Lisa handles that and she’s not in until Thursday, would you mind calling back then… It’s all a sign that they don’t care.
One theme, which I’ll be talking about later, is that of outsourcing responsibility. The idea is that the institution is set up so that their mistakes are your responsibility to fix.
Anyway, I’m sure she’d appreciate your favourite funny punctuation example.
Edit: My wife, Bonni, complained that I said that Lynne Truss was “my favourite Grumpy Old Woman”. For the record:
- Lynne Truss is clearly older.
- Bonni is not famous primarily for grumpiness. (Not all rants are grumpy.)
- “Cranky” is not the same as “grumpy”.
- Surely you can’t be a Grumpy Old Woman if you listen to 21st Century punk. (Apologies to Ms. Truss if she does. I’m grasping at straws here.)