lynne truss is an ugly jowly wench

Yes I suppose that its because theres a constant deluge of articles bemoaning the fact that our culture is being dumbed down by reality tv and lad mags and that we fear that our civilisation is under threat from Islam and from declining birth rates that we seek comfort in what we see as being immutable rules and this is why that jowly wrinkled old hag lynne trusse has made it to the top of the bestseller lists with eats shoots and leaves a book which appropriates the punchline from a genuinely funny panda bear related joke and includes in its subtitle zero tolerance a phrase originally coined by fascistic New York mayor Rudy Guiliani for her own reactionary ends about of all things punctuation a system of completely arbitrary rules invented at the same time as the printing press only about five hundred years ago and now seemingly under threat from the development of e-culture and text messaging but its depressing for anyone who knows Nietzches one hundred and thirty year old dictum that well never be free from gods till we give up our belief in grammar to see a book about arbitrary grammatical rules become a best seller at a time when europe is threatened by two equally fanatical religious movements in the united states and the arab world though its also ironic to anyone who has read ms trusses columns in her previous incarnation as a football writer for the Times of London in which she would write about what a beautiful pair of rippling buttocks former liverpool and nottingham forest striker Stan Collymore had no shit to see her hailed by a somewhat desperate media as a sort of Queen Canute holding back the forces of barbarism with her slender overpriced tome about those little marks that they dont have any of in any eastern language like sanskrit though a rich and diverse and lasting literature has managed to survive in that language all the same but on a more fundamental level it seems to me as someone who has a genuine love of language that its function is to communicate ideas and create something lasting beautiful and move society on instead of keeping it bound to archaic and arbitrary laws and the people who wrote and embellished and passed on the Iliad and the odyssey and the epic of gilgamesh and the Tain had no need of commas apostrophes colons semicolons full stops brackets hash marks just a passion for words and ideas the sort of things that seem alien to the lugubrious ms trusse who should recognise that language is in a constant state of flux like the universe of which it is a transient epiphenomon and that when all our resources run out and theres no electricity to power computers and all the books have burnt to generate heat it wont be her jaded prose that people will be scratching on the walls but perhaps instead the final chapter of Ulysses a riproaring lifeaffirmg torrent of words probably the apex of twentieth century literature written without any of these grammatical incumbencies Roddy Doyle isn't so keen on it but thats a whole different issue I guess some schoolteachers may disagree with me and see ms trusse as being some knight on shining armour and prescribe her oeuvre to their students if so Im saddened I see the function of education as being to educate and not to impose completely arbitrary rules although then again many of do live our lives according to precepts written by old men in the desert thousands of years ago and then it occurred to me that I havent yet read her bestselling magnum opus and that perhaps I should read her arguments before condemning them so roundly and I thought No thats just what she wants shes really no better than people who write to newspapers complaining that people have violated the grammatical rules they learned at school by using split infinitives and the like Jesus Christ how empty your lives must be get a life you miserable fucking losers and the success shes enjoyed and the attention shes received and the fact that ive hardly been able to open a newspaper for the last few months without seeing her plug ugly face far from representing braining up on our part really demonstrates how redundant intellectual life in the English speaking world and the united kingdom in particular No I dont want to be bound by arbitrary archaic laws No I want to let my mind soar free like Icarus the past and its laws and regulations and rules are something we can learn from but should not be bound by No Camus Sartre and others have long since recognised that all values are relative and if that theory cant be applied to something as trivial as grammar than weve learned nothing from the mistakes of the twentieth century I said No I wont No