thoughtcrumbs

Over an hour of grammatical pedantry

For those of you (like me) who have forsworn a business based solely on its misuse of the holy apostrophe ("LADIES NIGHT! FREE DRINK'S!"), and who have a tendency to drool over a novel directly proportional to its deployment of parenthetics, semicolons, and elipses, you'll love Bob Edwards' audio interview with Lynne Truss. She's written the surprisingly best-selling book, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation." She and Bob discuss, among other topics, panda munitions, the ominious "Giant Kid," and even whether the book's subtitle lacks a hyphen.

Even better is NPR's collection of related stories (at the bottom of the page), which includes:

• Middle school "grammar pirates" whose word-choice paradigm is Bob Costa
• The dumbing down of NY Times bestsellers and the journal Science
• The problem with the double "is"