Interested in the differences between American and British usage? If yes ,then do read Roger Cohen‘s delightful piece “Of Loos and Language”.Several years ago, Lynn Truss, the former host of the BBC Radio 4′s Cutting a Dash programme published an equally delightful book:Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation whose title derives from a well known amphibology :
” A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.
‘Why?’ asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
‘Well, I’m a panda’, he says, at the door. ‘Look it up.’
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. ‘Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
Surely,Mrs Truss and Mr. Cohen are as aghast as I am at the American propensity to use “that” to refer to persons and to render obsolete the difference between “that” and “which” .As language is a symbolic way to express oneself, how can one express oneself correctly without correct use of the symbols? A mathematician misusing symbols is hardly likely to come to the right result.
Filed under: Editorials, Language, Langue, Literature, Litterature, Opinions Tagué: | commas, Language, punctuation, that and which, usage
Well done.good post.It is sad indeed as you point out that journalists use “that” to refer to people as in “the man that came to see me”.while “that” usually denotes a segregation of an object–the one in particular- it should not refer to people.How right you are to bemoan these abuses.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment Pierre