From Lynne Truss, #7

I’m posting my final entry from Eats, Shoots and Leaves, the calendar created from the book of the same name by Lynne Truss. This entry is from August 9, 2009:

It is worrying that people are no longer learning how to use the colon and semicolon, not least because, in this supreme QWERTY keyboard era, the little finger of the right hand, deprived of its traditional function, may eventually dwindle and drop off from disuse.

From Lynne Truss, #6

The calendar Eats, Shoots and Leaves was written by Lynne Truss, taken from the book of the same name. I’ve been sharing a few favorites. This one is from July 2, 2009:

Cecil Hartley, in his Principles of Punctuation: or, The Art of Pointing (1818), includes this little poem, which tells us the simple one-two-three of punctuation values:

The stops point out, with truth, the time of pause
A sentence doth require at ev’ry clause.
At ev’ry comma, stop while one you count;
At semicolon, two is the amount;
A colon doth require the time of three:
The period fourth, as learned men agree.

And just one more remains.

From Lynne Truss, #5

We’re continuing to look at my favorites from the 2009 Eats, Shoots and Leaves calendar taken from Lynne Truss’s book. This fifth offering is from April 29, 2009:

The trend in the 20th century has been towards ever-simpler punctuation, but take any passage from a non-contemporary writer and you can’t help seeing the constituent words as so many defeated sheep that have been successfully corralled by good old Comma the Sheepdog.

Only two more to go after this one.

Calendar Gift—December

Images from winter and Christmas are some of my favorites.

So many memories are conjured up from these images.

This was our own tree that Jo photographed, the final image for the

calendar gift she gave me for Christmas 2010.

To enjoy all the images, search for “Calendar Gift” on this blog.

Calendar Gift—November

Spanish moss in a backyard tree against billows on blue. Another image by my daughter, who put together this calendar for me for Christmas 2010.

Delightful!

View all the images with a search of this blog: “Calendar Gift.”

Calendar Gift—October

Jo presented this image of glassware from my cupboard. The calendar is a gift from her
for Christmas 2010, with images she took herself.

I had a delightful year to enjoy her work and her gift.

You can see all the images with a blog search, using “Calendar Gift.”

From Lynne Truss, #4

Lynne Truss pictures the comma has a sheepdog in this April 28 entry from her 2009 Eats, Shoots and Leaves calendar. Out of the 365 pages, I saved just a handful. Here’s #4:

Between the 16th century and the present day, the comma became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog. The comma has so many jobs as “separator” (punctuation marks are traditionally either “separators” or “terminators”) that it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organizing words into sensible groups and making them stay put; sorting and dividing; circling and herding; and, of course, darting off with a peremptory “woof” to round up an wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom.