Review by Jeanne Englert
Grammar – February 1999 – Colorado Central Magazine
Woe is I
by Patricia T. O’Conner
Published in 1996 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons
ISBN 0-399-14196-0
IS WHOM DOOMED? (Even our esteemed CCM publisher Ed Quillen screwed up in the who/whom department in a recent column, but I was too compassionate to rebuke him.)
Why is everybody now a “they?” Should he or her be a they? What happened to the apostrophe? Does anyone care anymore about the difference between its and it’s?
Since nearly everyone who subscribes to CCM, it seems, either writes for it or to it, we all need this grammar book by Patricia T. O’Conner, subtitled The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English. O’Connor’s credentials are impeccable. She is an editor for the New York Times Book Review, and according to the leaf jacket blurb, taught the Times employees correct grammar.
The book starts out with a chapter titled, “Therapy for Pronoun Anxiety.” She says that if you’ve ever been picked on by the pronoun police, you’re in good company, don’t despair.
I have read, more accurately been forced to read, many a grammar book in my time, but don’t recall any that was funny. This one is. Once you stop laughing at catchy titles like, “A Cure for the Whom-sick,” you’ll learn some commonsense grammar.
O’Conner’s no schoolmarm. She gives us license to resolve the who/whom dilemma by saying, “Sure it’s not a hundred percent correct, but who is certainly less stuffy than whom in casual conversations, as in, `Did I tell you who I saw at the movies?'” Her sensible guide to whom reminded me of an anecdote San Francisco columnist and pundit Herb Caen wrote about a dean from the East Coast who retired in Berkeley. She was awakened one night by the phone. When she picked it up, she heard heavy breathing. “To whom do you wish to speak?” she inquired. “If you say `whom,’ lady, it ain’t you.”
While a liberal regarding who/whom, O’Conner refuses to compromise over the creeping theyness permeating the English language, even among newspaper reporters, who ought to know better. “I cringe when I hear a sentence like, `Somebody forgot to pay their bill,'” she says.
Nowhere is her practical grammatical advice more succinct than her treatment of how to know when to use “it’s” or “its.” In the section titled “An Itsy-Bitsy Problem,” she applies the same rule I’ve relied upon for years: If you can substitute “it is,” use “it’s.”
Simple, right? Then why do so many people have trouble with these itty-bitty handy pronouns? (One of my damfighting comrades used to drive me nuts when I’d edit his copy. Exasperated, I once pedantically ordered him not to use contractions at all until he got the idea.)
This compact book — it’s only 227 pages long, including the glossary, bibliography and index — also has a chapter on good writing. We’ve all read similar advice before. Strunk and White’s classic Elements of Style immediately comes to mind, but what O’Connor advises is worth rereading. One piece of advice I found amusing was not to tie yourself into knots to avoid repeating a word, which she said, editors sometimes call the slender yellow fruit syndrome, her example being that Freddie was offered an apple or a banana, and he chose the slender yellow fruit.
I winced at her #2 point of good writing, my worst writing fault, “Stop when you’ve said it.” Yet I’d write a letter to the Denver Post or something like that, and thinking that it was a little short, I’d be compelled to add more, so I would…
O.K., I’ve said it. Good grammar book. Fun to read. Get it. I stop.
–Jeanne Englert
