Between You & Me
Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (published by W.W. Norton Co. in 2015) is at once witty and outrageously bright. Norris stirs professional and personal memoir in with grammatical how-to and literary trivia. Her zany details (like her obsession with soft pencils, for example) and thought-provoking rants (like the chapter about pronouns) magically blend together to make this a great read and one from which even the best of writers could certainly learn a thing or two. As a successful copy-editor for the influential magazine, The New Yorker, the professional path Norris took to that position is both inspiring and totally approachable; as someone who has dabbled in work as a copy-editor, I found it fascinating and very informative. The former English teacher in me, savors her grammatical lessons and relishes the attention she gives some classic author’s grammatical usage (like Dickens’ commas, Melville and that hypen in Moby-Dick, and Whitman’s semicolons, to name a few). And I love that I finally now know why The New Yorker puts an umlaut (double dots over a vowel) in some words; it has always seemed curiously placed to me.
“Her zany details (like her obsession with soft pencils, for example) and thought-provoking rants (like the chapter about pronouns) magically blend together to make this a great read and one from which even the best of writers could certainly learn a thing or two. ”
My favorite chapter, titled “The Problem of Hees-h,” deals with the trouble English’s singular masculine and feminine (but no neuter) pronouns can cause. Norris pulls the chapter title from an A. A. Milne quote: “‘If the English language had been properly organized… there would be a word which meant both ‘he’ and ‘she’ and I could write: ‘If John or Mary comes, heesh will want to play tennis,’ which would save a lot of trouble’” (Norris 64). Isn’t that the truth! Any writer (or English teacher, for that matter) has had to wrestle with the awkwardness of ‘he/she’ or ‘s/he’ or ‘one’ in order to maintain a singular pronoun of possible mixed or unknown gender. As Norris says, “‘Heesh’ has the lovely property of looking as if it had been formed with ‘she’ backed into ‘he’ and spun around. Its playful, as befits the creator of Winne-the-Pooh and the sire of Christopher Robin” (65). The Comma Queen delves deep into this subject throughout the chapter cataloging a history of attempts made to come up with a singular pronoun to refer to a male or female (and all the wonkiness comprised therein). She acknowledges the problematic nature of male-dominated language (of the all-encompassing ‘he’ or ‘man’). I am pleased to say, I am with Norris on the use of “they,” in the context of he or she: it “is just wrong” grammatically speaking (69). After pages of pronoun grammar, which I found sort of thrilling, but I’m aware many (even most) folks would skim quickly to get back to more intriguing moments in her narrative, Norris returns to memoir. She describes how delicately personal pronoun usage can be, when she shares stories about Norris’s transgender younger sibling. This memoir moment in Between You & Me reveals how political and touchingly persona grammar can be.
After working her way through the grammar of a Comma Queen, Norris confesses her obsessive pencil behavior. Over the course of many pencil adventures, she became a Blackwing fan, or as she phrases it, an addict. These are very high quality (and pricey) pencils, and Norris demonstrates her love of pencils by going into details about the history of pencil making. By this chapter’s end, she even takes her reader on a tour of the Paul A. Johnson Pencil Sharpener Museum in Logan, OH. Norris is both comical and informative through these adventures and concludes the pencil addict chapter by proudly donating a pencil sharpener to the Johnson Pencil Sharpener collection (one that was “unique” as the collection held no other like it). Previous to reading this book, I had never really considered much about pencils beyond their use in sketching and drawing. After finishing this book, I noticed a box of Blackwing 602s in a shop downtown and felt excited that I had recognized them.
Her final chapter is an ode of sorts to the cranky New Yorker proofreader (previously compared to a Tasmanian Devil and whose name Norris shares she uses as code for having a bad day), Lu Burke. Like the rest of the book it merges copy-editor work stories with memoir. And it isn’t until the final paragraph that I understood just why she had included it. Even at the end of a book about grammar, written by a New Yorker copy-editor, the Comma Queen pauses, uncertain of proper use (for just a moment).
In the same vein, I hope that I’ve avoided any of the pitfalls of improper use herein, but as Mary Norris shares, even a copy-editor makes mistakes from time to time. Aside from the intimate levity at the heart of Between You & Me, I also appreciated Norris’s bibliography. While many may not, I look forward to reading Caroline Taggart and J. A. Wine’s My Grammar and I… Or Should That Be Me?, David Marsh’s For Who The Bell Tolls, as well as Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Reader Over Your Shoulder. And when I pick up a pencil, now, I smile and think of Mary Norris and all the clever facts gathered in Between You & Me.
A Few Great Passages:
“Parentheses often act like giant commas, and commas like tiny parentheses. And it struck me as sad that anyone could be so distracted by the punctuation of a sentence that he failed to absorb the meaning of the words” (103).
“I always wanted to write a book, but it looked really hard: how did you get all the lines to come out even on the right-hand side of the page?” (111).
“Because English has so many words of foreign origin, and words that look the same but mean something different depending on their context, and words that are in flux, opening and closing like flowers in a time-lapse photography, the human element is especially important if we are to stay on top of the computers, which, in their determination to our job for us, make decisions so subversive that even professional wordsmiths are taken by surprise. Once, in a piece that was about to go to press, I noticed that the word ‘cashier’ was broken ‘ca-shier.’ Curious because ‘cash-ier’ seemed obvious, I looked it up and found that Webster’s has two distinct entries: ‘ca-shier,’ a transitive verb, meaning ‘to dismiss from service,’ especially ‘to dismiss dishonorably,’ with the synonyms ‘reject, discard’; and ‘cash-ier,’ a noun, meaning ‘one that has charge of money.’ […] The computer, not knowing the difference between ‘cashier’ the verb and ‘cashier’ the noun, had chosen the first option” (112-113).
“If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic” (115).
“The semicolon can be done without. You can substitute a comma and a conjunction. But our system of punctuation is highly economical, and if the semicolon has survived all this time there must be some reason for it.
The thing about the semicolon is that, unless it is being used in the Whitmanesque sense, what follows it must be able to function as its own sentence—an independent clause. The semicolon creates a hook on which to dangle something off the first part of the sentence. It irritates me when someone uses the semicolon to join things that really have no relation to each other; it is a bald maneuver to make you keep reading. […] Used well, the semicolon makes a powerful impression; misused, it betrays your ignorance” (142).
