Mary Norris Quotes

The seven words George Carlin said you couldn't say on TV or radio ("fuck," "piss," "shit," "cunt," "motherfucker," "cocksucker," and "tits").

There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semi-colon. (the author is actually quoting a friend here)

Was it an insult to be called a "woman writer"? Didn't it have a taint of, say, the "woman driver"?

Sing in me, o Muse, of that small minority of men who are secure enough in their masculinity to use the feminine third-person singular!

Muphry's Law: "If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.

Melville has his tics, but he always put his words in the right order. Once you fall under the spell of the writer, you look past those ticks because you are more interested in what the writer says than judging how well he grasped the editorial conventions of his time.

The English language is full of words that are just waiting to be misspelled, and the world is full of sticklers, ready to pounce.

Has the casual use of profanity in English reached a high tide? That's a rhetorical question, but I'm going to answer it anyway: Fuck yeah.

Why, if there is alphabet soup, do we not have punctuation cereal?

Spelling is the clothing of words, their outward visible sign, and even those who favour sweatpants in everyday life like to make a bella figura, as the Italians say – a good impression – in their prose.

Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar.

On the printed page, it's best to have everything - you know, to still mind your P's and Q's, dot your I's and cross your T's, yes.

There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens.

Everybody is a writer. Everybody uses e-mail and has Facebook pages and tweets.

I can't help but think that the way we punctuate now is the right way - that we are living in a punctuation renaissance.

It is just possible that feminists have been literal-minded and, in pursuit of a political goal, have lost their sense of humour.

One bad habit Teall wishes to cure us of right away is mistreating the hyphen by putting it between an adverb ending in ly and a participle. His example is a headline: "Use of 'Methodist' Is Newly-Defined." Lavishing sympathy on the hyphen, he laments, "Did you ever see a hyphen more completely wasted? A hyphen more unnecessarily and fruitlessly employed?" Even

Fiddlesticks" is Scarlett O'Hara's way of saying "Fuck this shit.

I would never disable spell-check. That would be hubris. Autocorrect I could do without.

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 time-lapse photography, the human element is especially important if we are to stay on top of the computers, which, in their determination to do our job for us, make decisions so subversive that even professional wordsmiths are taken by surprise.

The comma, if it's left out, sometimes can be a problem. There's a slogan on a T-shirt going around that "Let's Eat, Grandma," and "Let's Eat Grandma."

Punctuation is a deeply conservative club. It hardly ever admits a new member.

One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience.

The point is not to let the orthography distract the reader from the meaning.

A writer friend who was born in England summed up her feelings for the semicolon in a remark worthy of Henry James: "There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semicolon." I guess the opposite of that is that there is no displeasure so obtuse as that of an ill-placed semicolon.

But good writers have a reason for doing things the way they do them, and if you tinker with their work, taking it upon yourself to neutralize a slightly eccentric usage or zap a comma or sharpen the emphasis of something that the writer was deliberately keeping obscure, you are not helping. In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process. They weigh queries, and they accept or reject them for good reasons. They are not defensive. The whole point of having things read before publication is to test their effect on a general reader. You want to make sure when you go out there that the tag on the back of your collar isn't poking up - unless, of course, you are deliberately wearing your clothes inside out.

Nobody knows everything-one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn-and everybody makes mistakes.

Something there is in cyberspace that doesn't love an apostrophe.

The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler.

You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words.

I have to admit that as a copy editor I agree with the conservatives - my job is to do no harm. But as a person - and as a writer and reader - I am all over the place.

So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.

Benjamin Franklin, who was already in his eighties when he befriended Webster, and who advocated spelling reform, had encouraged the younger man to adopt his ideas. Franklin proposed that we lose c, w, y, and j; modify a and u to represent their different sounds; and adopt a new form of s for sh and a variation on y for ng as well as tweak the h of th to distinguish the sounds of "thy" and "thigh," "swath" and "swathe." If Franklin had had his way, he would have been the Saint Cyril of America - Cyril "perfected" the Greek alphabet for the Russian language; hence the Cyrillic alphabet - and American English would look like Turkish.

The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around.

It's "I felt bad," not "I felt badly," because "to feel badly" would mean "to grope about ineptly." The verb "felt" - definitely a verb of the senses, though not on Gordon's list - fuses the "bad" to the subject, rather than simply using an adverb to modify itself.

The alphabet is the greatest invention of humankind, and even has a spark of the divine: it gave us the written word, which gave us the means to communicate with both the past and the future.

The image of the copy editor is of someone who favours a rigid consistency, a mean person who enjoys pointing out other people's errors, a lowly person who is just starting on her career in publishing and is eager to make an impression, or, at worst, a bitter, thwarted person who wanted to be a writer and instead got stuck dotting the i's and crossing the t's and otherwise advancing the careers of other writers.

If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic.