Zeno's Bar & Grill

We confess to more than a few rookie mistakes when we first started writing together. Since then, we’ve read a lot of books on usage, grammar and punctuation. In Thursday’s On Language column in the Chicago Tribune, Nathan Bierma writes about the upcoming illustrated version of William Strunk and E. B. White’s Elements of Style. Bierma writes that the co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Geoffrey Pullum, disagrees with many of their rules, including the prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition (he actually calls their book a “pox-ridden little pocketbook of pointless pontifications” on www.languagelog.org ). Winston Churchill, for one, agreed, “This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.” His exact quote is another academic controversy altogether. (See the link at www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/churchill.html). Goes to show that even the experts disagree and maybe there is hope for the rest of us occasional rule-breakers after all.

--Kelly & Melanie