“Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions”
Raise your hand if eww. The grammatical errors and infelicities found by Louis Menand in the punctuation guide Eats, Shoots & Leaves are enough to make this editor’s hair stand on end. Thanks anyway, Lynne Truss, but I’ll stick with the foundational texts in “the Edward Gorey school of grammar” (as one Amazon reviewer nicely puts it), Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s Deluxe Transitive Vampire and New Well-Tempered Sentence. They’re trustworthy and titillating–what more could you want in a grammar guide?