Home > Author > Mary Norris
1 " Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar. "
― Mary Norris , Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen
2 " If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic. "
― Mary Norris
3 " You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words. "
4 " Nobody knows everything—one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn—and everybody makes mistakes. "
5 " So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom. "
6 " Was it an insult to be called a “woman writer”? Didn’t it have a taint of, say, the “woman driver”? "
7 " The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler. "
8 " Etymology” is from the Greek and means the study (logia) of the “literal meaning of a word according to its origin” (etymon).... It can be a huge help in spelling. For instance, people sometimes misspell “iridescent.”... Rather than just try to memorize the spelling, if you look at the etymology—study the entrails of the word—you find that “iris, irid” is a combining form that comes from the Greek Iris, the goddess of the rainbow and the messenger of the gods.... [O]nce you know that “iridescent” comes from Iris, you’ll never spell it wrong. "
9 " 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. "
10 " I am not a Melville scholar; but ever since I read Moby-Dick Melville has been following me around. "
11 " Whom" may indeed be on the way out, but so is Venice, and we still like to go there. "
12 " The seven words George Carlin said you couldn’t say on TV or radio (“fuck,” “piss,” “shit,” “cunt,” “motherfucker,” “cocksucker,” and “tits”). "
13 " Fiddlesticks” is Scarlett O’Hara’s way of saying “Fuck this shit. "
14 " I would never disable spell-check. That would be hubris. Autocorrect I could do without. "
15 " In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process. "
16 " Muphry’s Law: “If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written. "
17 " Why, if there is alphabet soup, do we not have punctuation cereal? "
18 " 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. "
19 " Commas, like nuns, often travel in pairs. "
20 " There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens. "
