GrammarBlog

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Despite my grammatical obsessions, I'm nevertheless a staunch supporter of the idea that usage must ultimately triumph over dictum. Furthermore, a classical education is no excuse for pretentious, pseudo-Latin mangling.

So it's great to see GrammarBlog paragon AA Gill extol these concepts in his food column this week. I must admit, however, that pluralising penis as 'penes' does have a certain appeal, and I'm seriously contemplating using it in the politest of company.

Labels: AA Gill, Food Criticism, latin

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I do enjoy broadsheet restaurant criticism.

The best writers use a delightful combination of pretension, rudeness and malevolence. The unspoken concord between writer and reader - i.e. that this is just food and hence reviewing it is faintly ridiculous - provides the opportunity for gleeful childishness and linguistic showboating. GrammarBlog paragon AA Gill excels in food writing; he often spends most of his Sunday Times column digressing in relatively straightforward English, before delivering a savage, unusually concocted onslaught in the last 200 words.

The Blonde’s jellied ham was wet, cold, bacon-flavoured string with green bits. The main course, the faggots, was under-seasoned liverish balls that sat in a thin dew; they should have been raucous, gay offal bollocks wrapped in fatty caul and doused in a gravy made out of mink thong.

I also enjoy Michael Winner's food column. Winner has a different style: short, sharp, bilious sentences that bubble and snap with his slightly old-fashioned vocabulary.

Great Queen Street is awful, ghastly, ill-run, absurd. For a start this dump is so pretentious it doesn't put its name or its street number anywhere. Not on the window, not on the awning. Nothing.

Labels: AA Gill, Food Criticism, Michael Winner, top ten

img src="http://www.grammarblog.co.uk/z_images/banners/v2launch.gif" border="0" title="We've moved to www.grammarblog.co.uk" alt="We've moved to www.grammarblog.co.uk" /> This week in his Times column, A.A. Gill, a man for whom a place at the GrammarBlog table is always set, proved that a well used colon is a beautiful thing.

I started with a cup of coffee and a muffin. The coffee was made by someone I heard refer to herself as “coffee overseer of the greater New York area”. What she gave me was the universal coffee-flavoured effluvium that you get from Starbucks: thick and unfocused. The muffin was similarly malco, a sweaty bun that was sweet but stupid.

Even if you overlook the wonderfully eloquent scorn, you have to marvel at the way the colon perfectly tees up the second sentence for the pay off.

...coffee-flavoured effluvium that you get from Starbucks: (wait for it, wait for it...)
BLAM! Thick and unfocused.

Generally, I'm a big fan of the dash - it's a modern, versatile piece of kit and very useful when a comma just isn't pause enough. Its major advantage being that it's kind of a maverick punctuation mark — the D.I. Frost of punctuation. It doesn't follow any rules, but by God it gets results. These days its use tends to usurp that of both the semicolon and the colon for this very reason - if there are no rules, it's difficult to get wrong. The writer can therefore sprinkle dashes liberally about his prose without fear of reprise.

However, Mr Gill's mastery of the colon as given me renewed endeavour to use it more myself. Despite the fact that it is unpredictable, unyielding and difficult to get a handle on, the colon just seems to have more dramatic effect, more impact. To extend the analogy, if the dash is punctuation's Frost, the colon is its Jack Bauer.

Lynn Truss is another fan of the colon, as she writes in Eats, shoots and leaves.

Using the apostrophe correctly merely tells the world you aren't a thicko. Using the comma well announces that you have an ear for sense and rhythm, confidence in your style and a proper respect for your reader, but it doesn't mark you out as a master of your craft. But colons and semicolons — well, they are in a different league, my dear!

Before you ask, you would be right to assume one thing: I do think the sun shines out of A.A. Gill's colon.

Labels: AA Gill, Bauer, colons, punctuation