I'm surprised that in the more than five months I've been absent from work, our papers haven't been flooded with complaints from readers upset that stories from Albany don't have enough hyphens in them, or have them in the wrong places.
My biggest grammatical tick is assuring that compound adjectives ("deficit-reduction plan, last-minute victory, public-health assessment,'' etc) are connected by hyphens, while adverbs and the adjectives they modify ("newly painted store, highly decorated veteran, deeply troubled project'') are not.
I have tortured generations of correspondents and interns with these basic grammatical lessons. I am used to watching them roll their eyes.
This issue came to mind again because I just finished a fun book called "Eats, Shoots and Leaves'' about the deterioration of punctuation and how that is causing problems with understanding language, especially in the instant-communication age.
Author Lynne Truss, tongue in cheek, dedicated the book "to the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution."
The title refers to a joke about a panda bear who went into a restaurant, had a meal, shot the place up and then walked out. He explained that that's what pandas do, according to a guide book. The problem is there should be no comma after "eats.'' Then the phrase merely describes the panda's diet of shoots and leaves.
The other reason I thought of picky grammar was a recent Maureen Dowd column in the NY Times about greedy bankers.
"Goldmine Sachs, as its known, is out for itself,'' she wrote, in a sentence that presumably went through multiple layers of editors and I'm sure she was proud of as a clever turn of phrase on the name of the investment bank Goldman Sachs.
Truss dedicated several pages of her book to the idiocy of not including an apostrophe in "it's'' when it is meant to read "it is'' and not the possessive.
And yet this simple mistake found its way into the story of one of the best known columnists in the country on arguably the most influential page of any newspaper. Yet there was no outcry the next day.
I can almost feel myself growing into a curmudgeon, which I think will suit me.
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Ah, Jay!! You've hit upon one of my great pet peeves as a lover of language...the inability to get "its" straight!! What a disappointment that such a glaring error would appear where it did. The you're/your problem also vexes me greatly. Was unaware of the rule concerning compound adjectives - I tend to use hyphens on an ad hoc basis, I must admit. Despite not always being able to remember the precise nature of the rules or their origins, I am a proud grammar curmudgeon (and am always thrilled to discover others among my friends and colleagues).
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Margie Eddy
One of the most disturbing revelations on Facebook is the tenuous grasp many of my friends have on punctuation. Ignorance of the correct use of apostrophes is a prime example. That should mean more job opportunities for old reporters. Unfortunately, few employers seem to care.
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