Punctuation

I'm trying to finish all of my book notes from 2023. We're exactly three weeks into 2024, and I'm already writing about books that I am reading this year, even though I haven't finished with last year yet. So typical. So me. 

Last September, I read Mary McGrory's Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. If you like literary memoirs, especially of the small town girl in NYC variety (and why would you not), then the first few chapters of this are great, almost reminiscent of Helene Hanff, and this is very very high praise. In the early chapters, McGrory writes about her early life in Ohio (where she was the first woman to drive a milk delivery truck, which is no easy job anywhere, especially Ohio in winter) and her move to New York City, where she joined the New Yorker as a copy editor, a job she would hold for decades.  I don't know if it's possible now for a young person from a working-class background to show up in Manhattan, find a poorly paid literary job, and then build a life full of books and friends and adventure and fun. America has gotten better than it was when I was young, in so many ways, but some things have changed for the worse. Some things have been lost and won't be found again. 

Anyway, the rest of the book is fine, too - it just turns out that I don’t care as much as I thought I did about correct usage of the serial comma (I agree, though, that we in the United States should refer to it as the serial comma and not the Oxford comma) or the distinction between the relative pronouns which and that, or even appropriate case vis a vis “between you and me” (correct) vs. “between you and I” (incorrect). Or that is to say, I do care, but I don’t care enough to do anything other than to always use the serial comma and enforce its use when I’m in charge of style decisions, always use a comma before which when the word begins a non-restrictive clause, and always know the difference between the subject and the object. I’m no longer inclined to correct other people’s grammar and usage unless I’m asked to do so professionally (this actually happens fairly often). 

McGrory, though, does not come across as dictatorial or pedantic when she makes her case for correct use and style. And her stories - about style debates at the New Yorker (whose house style is odd to say the least) and her relationships with quirky editorial staff and her encounters with famous writers - are entertaining and good-humored. She writes with love and affection but also honesty about New York in the 1970s as it was for a young person pursuing a literary career and a literary life. I’d have enjoyed more of that and more of the stories of the inner workings of the New Yorker, and maybe less of the arguments in favor of the serial comma and against incorrect use of “me” in a phrase that calls for a subjective pronoun, but maybe that’s because I am already on board with these positions, as I suspect anyone would be who chose to read the work of a self-professed comma queen. We’re the choir, is what I am saying. There’s no need to preach to us. Technically, “between you and I” is not grammatically correct but it’s not unclear and it doesn’t bother me when other people say it. Age has mellowed me, I suppose.