Book: Have you Eaten Grandma? by Gyles Brandreth
Krishna
This book brings to mind that great book on punctuation by Lynn Truss ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves‘.
The subject matter is the same. Both authors are passionate about the correct use of both the English language and the punctuation. Both have even chosen a title that illustrates what an absence of a punctuation or a presence of a punctuation at an unnecessary place can do to the meaning of the sentence.
The author of this book is an actor, former MP, writer (as you can see from this book) and a television personality. He is a stickler for the correct use of English and he gives funny examples of what happens when you get a punctuation wrong. Apart from the title, there are other examples described early in the book as in ‘Rachel Ray finds inspiration in cooking her family and her dog’ on a magazine cover, no less; ‘We are going to learn to cut and paste kids!’ on a school computer.
He also talks about viz (The word that is used to mean ‘as follows’ usually). The origin is videlicet, literally ‘permitted to see’ – Latin of course. It is shortened as viet, which in shorthand looks like viz. So the spelling itself became viz in print. Nice!
He goes through the obligatory sections of each punctuation (period, comma, semi-colon, colon, the curious em-dash and en-dash and how it differs from the garden variety dash) in turn giving nice examples and some asides (old ones like ‘The Santa's little helpers are subordinate Clauses’) which are funny. But I am trying to determine how it would help you if you have already read ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ and I really cannot put my finger into anything specific.This is a fun read too, if you love the language but if you want to understand correct usage of punctuation, either one would do. The other one is a bit funnier, in my opinion.
Like the other book to which this will be invariably compared, there is a section devoted to each punctuation mark. There is some new material here. In plurals, Gyles delves into word origins – etymology – of why a particular plural is different from just adding an ‘s at the end of singular. That is nice. But when he goes into spelling and spills pages after pages of mnemonics (not very useful to a lay person like me) it gets to be tedious to read.
Probably the best chapter in the book is on apostrophe, which he describes well. A lot of gems here : the author has stuffed a lot of interesting linguistic history in this book. He talks about how come Cholmondeley is called ‘Chumli’. Featherstonehaugh is called ‘Fanshaw’ Marjoribanks as Marchbanks and Wriothesley as Ridley.
And fun to read are three different meanings just based on where and where not you place an apostrophe for ‘ Those things there are my husbands’.
There is a lot of recycled jokes and fun poems on English but still they are good to read, even if you have come across them before.
The US English vs British English is nice too – He goes through the common mistakes that people make; he also goes into the internet abbreviations. Nice to read.
Some gems are hidden in the middle of the book too. He talks about homonyms. Wether, he informs us, stands for a castrated sheep, whence comes bellwether, which is the leading sheep with a bell around her neck.
Nice collections all along. Gyles is a lifelong collector, we realize as we read the book. Almost all are nice except (at least for me) the mnemonic section which was an uninteresting technique to remember the correct spelling and the rhyming Cockney which made no sense at all.
The little grammar lesson at the end also was interesting, to me.
7/10
– – Krishna (April 2019)