Cinderella of the English language

i finished reading "a thousand barrels a second." there's not much to do here on weekends, because most staff goes home and there is really no transportation to get us anywhere, except for our bikes that can take us to a few select nearby villages. so i slung up my second hammock on friday, and spent most of the weekend reading. it's a neat book. read it.

my new love, conveniently, is also my new book. i've been meaning to read "eats, shoots and leaves" since i heard about it a few years ago, but have never gotten around to actually doing it. i cracked it open today, and the preface was all it took for me to be spellbound. i will share some of the good bits:

-Praise for Eats, Shoots and Leaves: "At long last--a worthy tribute to punctuation's stepchildren: the neglected semicolon, the enigmatic ellipses and the mad dash. Punc-rock on!"- James Lipton. (ha. "punc-rock on"? so nerdy.)
-(from the foreword): "Once the poor stepchild of grammar..., punctuation will emerge as the Cinderella of the English language."
-the author asked "passers-by to 'pin the apostrophe on the sentence' for a harmless afternoon chat show." CUTE! best idea ever!
-"Some may say that the British are obsessed with class difference and that knowing your apostrophes is a way of belittling the uneducated." (this is how i feel, for real. yikes.)
-"For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word 'Book's' with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker." (again, how i feel.)
-"Part of one's despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. . . . We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation." (note: i am really unsure of how i should work my ellipsis in that paragraph, and genuinely fear the ridicule of my fellow grammarians. you know who you are.)

thanks to this book, i am realizing that i don't actually love grammar, as i have always assumed. i will have to relinquish the title of "grammar girl," and perhaps gracefully move on to "punctuation princess." i'm not so good with grammar as a whole, but i'm pretty punctu-riffic, i think.

i am only on page 19, and i am already dreading reaching the end of this book. it is too good.