My Google ranking for the phrase "A Panda Walks Into a Bar" has fallen from #1 to #12. So, in a misguided attempt to boost my totally worthless placement, I bring you links to two articles related to Eats, Shoots and Leaves:
"You pour thing, if you don't see the point of spelling correctly" by Lynne Truss:
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?
"For Want of a Comma, the Meaning Was Lost" by Jef Raskin, writing an open letter to Lynne Truss:
And when you say that "you can't write comments in the margin of your screen to be discovered by another reader fifty years down the line," I imagine that you perhaps have not seen threaded discussions and "Wikis". Not only can I add marginal notes, but because of the bidirectional nature of the Web, a comment can become incorporated as part of the material that all subsequent readers see, not just the chance reader of my copy. For example, one comment I made on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu) became incorporated into the work (with due credit). My marginal comments on my paper copy of the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), however, are unlikely to become memorialized so accessibly.
Posted by Karl
July 23, 2004 08:38 PM