Yes, I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
These are interesting times for word nerds. We ate, shot and left, bonding over a joke about a panda and some rants about greengrocers who abuse apostrophes. We can go on Facebook and vow to judge people when they use poor grammar. The fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style inspired sentimental reveries. Grammar Girl's tally of Twitter followers is well into six digits. We can't get enough of a parody of the Associated Press Stylebook, of all things, or a collection of "unnecessary" quotation marks.
Could you care less? Does bad grammar or usage "literally" make your head explode? Test your need for this new book with these sentences:
"Katrina misplaced many residents of New Orleans from their homes."
"Sherry finally graduated college this year."
"An armed gunman held up a convenience store on Broadway yesterday afternoon."
Pat yourself on the back if you found issues in every one of these sentences, but remember: There is a world out there beyond the stylebooks, beyond Strunk and White, beyond Lynne Truss and Failblogs. In his long-awaited follow-up to Lapsing Into a Comma and The Elephants of Style, while steering readers and writers on the proper road to correct usage, Walsh cautions against slavish adherence to rules, emphasizing that the correct choice often depends on the situation. He might disagree with the AP Stylebook or Merriam-Webster, but he always backs up his preferences with logic and humor.
Walsh argues with both sides in the language wars, the sticklers and the apologists, and even with himself, over the disputed territory and ultimately over whether all this is warfare or just a big misunderstanding. Part usage manual, part confessional, and part manifesto, Yes, I Could Care Less bounces from sadomasochism to weather geekery, from "Top Chef" to Monty Python, from the chile of New Mexico to the daiquiris of Las Vegas, with Walsh's distinctive take on the way we write and talk. Yes, I Could Care Less is a lively and often personal look at one man's continuing journey through the obstacle course that some refer to, far too simply, as "grammar."
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Bill Walsh. (2013). Yes, I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk. St. Martin's Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Bill Walsh. 2013. Yes, I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk. St. Martin's Publishing Group.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Bill Walsh, Yes, I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk. St. Martin's Publishing Group, 2013.
MLA Citation (style guide)Bill Walsh. Yes, I Could Care Less: How to Be a Language Snob Without Being a Jerk. St. Martin's Publishing Group, 2013.
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These are interesting times for word nerds. We ate, shot and left, bonding over a joke about a panda and some rants about greengrocers who abuse apostrophes. We can go on Facebook and vow to judge people when they use poor grammar. The fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style inspired sentimental reveries. Grammar Girl's tally of Twitter followers is well into six digits. We can't get enough of a parody of the Associated Press Stylebook, of all things, or a collection of "unnecessary" quotation marks.
Could you care less? Does bad grammar or usage "literally" make your head explode? Test your need for this new book with these sentences:
"Katrina misplaced many residents of New Orleans from their homes."
"Sherry finally graduated college this year."
"An armed gunman held up a convenience store on Broadway yesterday afternoon."
Pat yourself on the back if you found issues in every one of these sentences, but remember: There is a world out there beyond the stylebooks, beyond Strunk and White, beyond Lynne Truss and Failblogs. In his long-awaited follow-up to Lapsing Into a Comma and The Elephants of Style, while steering readers and writers on the proper road to correct usage, Walsh cautions against slavish adherence to rules, emphasizing that the correct choice often depends on the situation. He might disagree with the AP Stylebook or Merriam-Webster, but he always backs up his preferences with logic and humor.
Walsh argues with both sides in the language wars, the sticklers and the apologists, and even with himself, over the disputed territory and ultimately over whether all this is warfare or just a big misunderstanding. Part usage manual, part confessional, and part manifesto, Yes, I Could Care Less bounces from sadomasochism to weather geekery, from "Top Chef" to Monty Python, from the chile of New Mexico to the daiquiris of Las Vegas, with Walsh's distinctive take on the way we write and talk. Yes, I Could Care Less is a lively and often personal look at one man's continuing journey through the obstacle course that some refer to, far too simply, as "grammar."- reviews
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"Reading Yes, I Could Care Less is like bellying up to your favorite neighborhood bar while a cranky yet lovable uncle holds forth on the perils of comma splices and misplaced hyphens. Walsh is combative and funny, and he doesn't suffer fools gladly In short, Walsh brings some welcome newsroom swagger and regular-guy moxie into the often prim world of style and syntax."
- premium: False
- source: Kirkus Reviews
- content: "A frisky reminder that usage issues are part convention, part passion."
- premium: False
- source: Baltimore Sun
- content: "You should be so lucky as to have Bill Walsh as your editor. Pay attention. Be clear. Be precise. Don't be a jerk."
- premium: False
- source: The Washingtonian
- content: "If you dream about correcting the office grammar Nazi, pick up Washington Post copyeditor Bill Walsh's witty book Yes, I Could Care Less."
- premium: False
- source: Patricia T. O'Conner, author of Woe Is I and, with Stewart Kellerman, Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language.
- content: "How can you not love a language maven who admits up front (well, in the Epilogue anyway) that he's nuts? And who wouldn't be? Bill Walsh has to walk a fine line. He's enough of a pickypants to satisfy readers of The Washington Post, but he never crosses the line into jerkitude. Or hardly ever. (Give up the hyphen, Bill. The word is email.) Oh, and did I mention that's he's funny? Armed gunmen, he tells us, are 'the worst kind.' And you probably think you know what domestic beer is. But as the author can tell you, it's in the eye of the bartender."
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June 24, 2013
Walsh (The Elephants of Style) uses his years as a copy editor for The Washington Post to deliver an irreverent, meandering tour through the vagaries of the English language. The self-proclaimed "word nerd" waxes philosophical on a wide variety of subjectsâfrom the proper uses of punctuation, to misused phrases like "could care less" and "literally", to inaccurate plurals and possessives. Unfortunately, he has so much fun sharing his opinions that he often moves on to the next quibble before finishing his point. His Curmudgeon's Stylebook introduces readers to brief opinions on the proper way to use "anniversary", "coffee shop", compound nouns, ramen noodles, and much more. As Walsh explains, this is about "what I care about,...what I don't care about, and why." Of course, he also admits to being "a big fat elitist" so readers can take his words with a grain of salt. While it's entertaining to see a master at work, Walsh undermines his own efforts to share his expertise with forced casualness, offhanded humor, and lack of focus. Those looking for a useful reference manual or a pure work of comedy will likely be disappointed. Agent: Janet Rosen, Sheree Bykofsky Associates.
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May 1, 2013
A copy editor at the Washington Post returns with his third rant-cum-English usage manual (Lapsing into a Comma, 2000, etc.). The volume sometimes has the appearance of a cut-and-paste job: Recto pages feature headers selected from the author's tweets; occasional text boxes offer information about compound words, hyphenation, famous movie lines that people commonly misquote (Bogart said only, "Play it, Sam") and the meanings of abbreviations (GAO is now the Government Accountability Office). Some chapters are principally argument and/or exposition (Walsh goes after Strunk and White); others are lists of usage issues and the author's views about them. The author's tone and diction vary from serious to silly. "The en [dash]," he writes in the latter way, "is a prissy punctuation mark that I have little use for." Walsh does have some serious points to make. Writers should know the conventions of written English and know their audiences. Other folks still do judge our commas, our capital letters, our use of lie and lay. A little grammar helps, too. Knowing the difference between an essential and a nonessential clause, knowing when something is in apposition, when it is not--it's hard to use commas correctly when you don't know the grammatical structures you're employing. He deals with many common issues, and he takes on the double possessive, the use of hopefully (lost cause, he believes), comma splices, disinterested and uninterested, who and whom (he is softening on this one), subject-verb agreement with collective nouns, and the expressions graduated high school and going to prom. A frisky reminder that usage issues are part convention, part passion.COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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These are interesting times for word nerds. We ate, shot and left, bonding over a joke about a panda and some rants about greengrocers who abuse apostrophes. We can go on Facebook and vow to judge people when they use poor grammar. The fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style inspired sentimental reveries. Grammar Girl's tally of Twitter followers is well into six digits. We can't get enough of a parody of the Associated Press Stylebook, of all things, or a collection of "unnecessary" quotation marks.
Could you care less? Does bad grammar or usage "literally" make your head explode? Test your need for this new book with these sentences:
"Katrina misplaced many residents of New Orleans from their homes."
"Sherry finally graduated college this year."
"An armed gunman held up a convenience store on Broadway yesterday afternoon."
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