Any color (colour?) you like. (6/3/04)

I recently picked up Lynn Truss' newest book, Eats, shoots and leaves, a wickedly funny satire about the horrors, misuses, and misconceptions about punctuation, thinking it would make me feel good about my sometimes anal attitude towards the proper use of the English language. Yet scarcely fifty pages in, it has me feeling embarrassed at my lack of thorough knowledge of the subject. For years I would be the one who would cringe every time a friend would proclaim happily "I did so good on my last exam!" and icily correct them, "you did well!" In this I would find supreme satisfaction. That is not to say that I am completely aloof and snooty about proper use of punctuation, in fact I edit anything I can get my hands on. I yearn to teach people how to use my mother tongue to its fullest. But now I have doubts as to whether I wrote any of the above statement correctly. (Should I or shouldn't I have used but at the beginning of the previous sentence?)

My sojourn into the vast world of proper and often self-centered use of English began at a relatively young age when I read The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Don't get me wrong, I was one of the worst spellers in elementary school. Try as I might, I could not get my head around words like "writing" ("you're a writer and you can't spell writing?" I was once asked), which to many people seems easy enough - not to me. The Phantom Tollbooth offered new and humorous ways to look at words and their relationship to one another. If you have yet to read this book, do so! It is never too late nor are you too old. I digress.

Somehow I got over my spelling stumbling block with flying colors - colours? - and am often asked how to spell seemingly hard words. Next came punctuation. I can say with no disrespect to any of my wonderful and not so wonderful English teachers over the years that I am self-taught in that area. So I thought. I had mastered the Oxford comma ("apples, oranges, and bananas") years before my grade ten class was given a full week devoted to the pesky little bugger. Then came college.

My psychology - yes, psychology - teacher was a man who was a stickler when it comes to misusage of "itses". He handed back my paper on Erik Erikson (I can proudly say I did well on that one!) and I was blinded by all the red marks scattered over my writing. The content was great, but I never deviated between "it's" and "its". How could I have missed something like that. Something that may be the simplest and clearest punctuation rule in the English language. "It's" means either "it is" or "it has". If not, the proper word to use is "its". Simple really.

I'm glad I mastered that before cracking open Mrs. Truss' book, or I may have died of mortification. Her view of people who cannot understand the difference between the two and plainly refuse to try and eventually end up using only one regardless should be drawn a quartered, in not so many words. No pun intended.

I know now that my complete grasp of English punctuation may not be any time soon. I may yet still misplace a comma, form fragmented or run-on sentences, put either too little or too many apostrophes. But learning comes from mistakes and I acknowledge now that every one makes them.

After that, I think I will work on forming proper introduction and conclusion paragraphs, but don't get me started on those.