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Have you eaten grandma? (A review)
Original work by Gyles Brandreth published by Michael Joseph 2018 Reviewed by Barry Tomalin
Barry Tomalin International House London barrytomalin@aol.com
Published in Training, Language and Culture Vol 2 Issue 4 (2018) pp. 103-105 doi: 10.29366/2018tlc.2.4.9 Recommended citation format: Tomalin, B. (2018). Have you eaten grandma? (A review). Training, Language and Culture, 2(4), 103-105. doi: 10.29366/2018tlc.2.4.9
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0)
In 2003 the writer and broadcaster, Lynne Truss, published what became an international best seller, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, a humorous but also serious guide to correct punctuation. She dedicated the book to the memory of the printers of St Petersburg in Russia, who in 1905 demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters.
Now Gyles Brandreth, the broadcaster, humourist, former member of parliament and, currently, Chancellor of Chester University has followed in her footsteps but expanded the brief. Have you Eaten Grandma? is an informal and humorous guide not just to correct punctuation but also to spelling and vocabulary. It contains ten chapters with a useful index although there is no contents list or suggestions for further reading. The ten chapters cover the basic elements of punctuation, the use of dashes and hyphens, when and when
not to use apostrophes, spelling rules, plural forms, the influence of American English, the use of homophones, homographs and heterographs, abbreviations and bad language, and concludes with a summary of rules for writers, offered by such luminaries as George Orwell, Martin Amis and William Safire.
The title Have You Eaten Grandma? sums up the humorous style but serious intent. Without the comma, the question suggests cannibalistic tendencies. With the comma after 'eaten' as in, 'Have you eaten, Grandma?' the meaning is completely different, a grandchild asking their grandmother if she would like something to eat. The punctuation section is light-hearted but good and clear with plenty of examples of unfortunate errors, especially in the misuse of apostrophes. But it is spelling where the book gets going, starting with US Vice-President Dan Quayle correcting a child on a visit to an elementary school. The child
© Barry Tomalin 2018
This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Training, Language and Culture
Volume 2 Issue 4, 2018
doi: 10.29366/2018tlc.2.4.9
rudn.tlcjournal.org
had written the word potato on the board. Quayle stepped forward and corrected the word, adding an 'e' - potatoe! Quayle later described the error as 'a defining moment' of the worst imaginative kind.
An interesting discussion considers the work of the English dictionary maker Dr Samuel S Johnson in 1752, and the US dictionary maker Noah Webster in 1828. It was Webster who 'americanised' the English language by dropping the silent 'u' in color and humor and turning centre into center and theatre into theater. He changed defence to defense and gaol to jail.
He was the author of The American Spelling Book (1783) and The Elementary Spelling Book (1829) and, as an obsessive speller, pioneered the competitive spelling bee. His list of difficult English words to spell and his list of mnenomics to suggest ways of remembering is very helpful. His rules of when to use capital letters are useful to learners, teachers and researchers, as are his lists of common prefixes and suffixes.
Lists are where Brandreth comes into his own and will be of the greatest value to linguistic researchers. He is good at advising when a noun ending in 'o' takes an 's' or an 'es' in the plural and giving examples of nouns derived from Latin, Greek, French and Italian. He is also good at correcting one of the commonest errors made by
non-native speakers. Do we say, 'Here is the news' or 'Here are the news'? If you're French you'll probably want to say, 'Here are the news' in the plural. But in English 'news' is singular.
Brandreth is very good on American imports into British English. Did you know the impeccably British expressions, keeping a stiff upper lip and keeping your cool are actually American in origin? Stiff upper lip was introduced in 1915 and was popularised by an American women's rights activist Phoebe Carey, who used it in a poem.
For linguists who are not millennials or members of Generation Z, the real payoff of this book is the study of acronyms used in social media and so-called 'bad language'. If you're not familiar with OMG (oh my God!) and LOL (lots of laughs), or AFK (away from keyboard) this is the place for you and your chance to 'get down with the kids'.
Some very rude expressions are also presented and explained, though with impeccable political correctness. One reason for the increased use of acronyms is lack of space in electronic communication by Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. That's one reason why many users finish their tweets with end of, meaning nothing more to say. By the way, when you receive an email from abroad in English, do you actually know the origin of the abbreviations 'cc' and 'bcc'? We know that 'cc' means copied to and 'bcc' means copied in
Have you eaten grandma? (A review)
Original work by Gyles Brandreth, reviewed by Barry Tomalin
private, but the origin of 'cc' is carbon copy, going back to the days when a copy of a message was made on carbon paper for future reference, and 'bcc' stands for blind carbon copy, a carbon copy for someone we haven't told you about. Funny how the old and the new meet in the modern.
Have You Eaten Grandma? is an amusing and a highly enjoyable browse for English language enthusiasts. It's also a useful guide for teachers and language researchers into what constitutes contemporary English usage. OK. End of.
