Between You & Me Quotes

“Fiddlesticks” is Scarlett O’Hara’s way of saying “Fuck this shit.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“Whom" may indeed be on the way out, but so is Venice, and we still like to go there.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“Why, if there is alphabet soup, do we not have punctuation cereal?”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“First we get the rocks out, Alice. Then we get the pebbles out. Then we get the sand out, and the writer’s voice rises. No harm done.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“The English language is full of words that are just waiting to be misspelled, and the world is full of sticklers, ready to pounce.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“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.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“Muphry’s Law: “If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“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!”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“Nobody knows everything—one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn—and everybody makes mistakes.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“I can’t help but think that the way we punctuate now is the right way—that we are living in a punctuation renaissance.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“who” stands in for “he, she, they, I, we”; “whom” stands in for “him, her, them, me, us.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“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.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“I always wanted to write a book, but it looked really hard: how did you get all the lines to come out even on the right-hand side of the page?”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“Punctuation is a deeply conservative club. It hardly ever admits a new member.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“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.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“I would never disable spell-check. That would be hubris. Autocorrect I could do without.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“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.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“Some women bristle, in certain contexts, at being called female: it seems to focus exclusively on the reproductive system, and makes you feel like a chicken, all thighs and breasts.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“Back in the twentieth century, we thought that robots would have taken over by this time, and, in a way, they have. But robots as a race have proved disappointing. Instead of getting to boss around underlings made of steel and plastic with circuitry and blinking lights and tank treads, like Rosie the maid on The Jetsons, we humans have outfitted ourselves with robotic external organs. Our iPods dictate what we listen to next, gadgets in our cars tell us which way to go, and smartphones finish our sentences for us. We have become our own robots.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“You had to be willing to admit that you were capable of missing something or you would not catch what you missed.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“I once asked Eleanor Gould how to make the plural possessive of McDonald’s, and she very sensibly told me to leave it alone. “You have to stop somewhere,” she said. We stopped at McDonald’ses’.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“A colon is sometimes preferable to a semicolon if the thrust of the sentence is forward: you are amplifying something, providing a definition or a list or an illustration. The semicolon sets up a different relationship; whatever follows relates in a more subtle way to what came before. A dash can perform either of these services, but it is looser, less formal.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“Teall feels that the words that lose the hyphen and become solid tend to be figurative (cowcatcher), while the ones that retain the hyphen are literal (bronco-buster). The same logic seems to be behind The New Yorker’s decision about “hard-boiled” and “hardboiled.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“The received wisdom about compounds is that they start out as two words, acquire a transitional hyphen, and then lose the hyphen, becoming one word. “Today” used to be hyphenated. “Ringtone” was two words for about a nanosecond before solidifying, skipping the hyphen stage completely.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“We know that Dickens got paid by the word (writers still do), a fact that is often used to explain his prodigious output, but I think he might have collected a bonus for punctuation. Dickens was especially fond of inserting a comma between the subject and the predicate, one of the few things that the two modern schools of punctuation agree is a mistake.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen