NOTES
ix “Of course, when you correct”: Francis A. Burkle-Young and Saundra Rose Maley, The Art of the Footnote: The Intelligent Student’s Guide to the Art and Science of Annotating Texts (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), p. 81.
Introduction: Confession of a Comma Queen 7 “In the view’s right-middle ground”: John McPhee, “Coming into the Country—IV,” The New Yorker, July 11, 1977, p. 38. This and McPhee’s other pieces about Alaska were later collected as Coming into the Country (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978).
8 It’s from the Greek: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed., s.v. “synecdoche.”
Chapter 1: Spelling Is for Weirdos 18 “Several of our vowels”: Noah Webster, A Grammatical Institute, of the English Language, 1st ed. (Hartford, CT: Hudson & Goodwin [1783]), p. 5. Facsimile edition printed at Paladin Commercial Printers for the Noah Webster House, Inc., and Museum of West Hartford History, West Hartford, CT.
20 “the forgotten founding father”: Joshua Kendall, The Forgotten Founding Father: Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture (New York; G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2010).
21 “born definer”: Ibid., p. 5.
22 “Spelling is the art”: Webster, Grammatical Institute, p. 24.
23 “These words are vulgarly”: Ibid., p. 33 (note).
26 “Americans rejected ake”: Harlow Giles Unger, Noah Webster: The Life and Times of an American Patriot (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1998), p. 252.
Chapter 2: That Witch!
51 “But rock columns are”: John McPhee, “Annals of the Former World: In Suspect Terrain—II,” The New Yorker, Sept. 20, 1982, p. 47. This and other pieces about the geology of North America were collected in In Suspect Terrain (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), which was in turn collected in Annals of the Former World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998).
52 “As we drank tea”: Lauren Collins, “Sark Spring,” The New Yorker, Oct. 29, 2012, p. 55.
53 “Walking down the long”: Edward St. Aubyn, Mother’s Milk, in The Patrick Melrose Novels (New York: Picador, 2012), p. 496.
54 “While picking kids up at school”: George Saunders, “The Semplica-Girl Diaries,” The New Yorker, Oct. 15, 2012, p. 69. This story was later collected in Tenth of December (New York: Random House, 2013).
Chapter 3: The Problem of Heesh 59 “the words male and female”: David Marsh, For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man’s Quest for Grammatical Perfection (London: Guardian Faber Publishing, 2013), p. 232.
60 “English . . . has certain unusual”: Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Reader Over Your Shoulder, (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), pp. 6–7.
60 “Gender is illogical”: Ibid., p. 7.
62 “a poor little weak thing”: Mark Twain, “The Awful German Language.” See http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html.
63 “Every noun has a gender”: Ibid.
63 “She fit him totally”: American Masters: LENNONYC, a documentary; premiered on PBS December 4, 2012; aired again on March 21, 2014; Michael Epstein, director/writer. See http://video.pbs.org/video/2309422687/; http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/lennonyc/about-the-film/1551/.
64 “English has a number”: Bryan A. Garner, Garner’s Modern American Usage, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 739.
64 “If the English language had”: Milne, quoted in Marsh, For Who the Bell Tolls, p. 225.
65 Alternatives come from all over: These examples are from Dennis Baron, “The Epicene Pronouns: A Chronology of the Word That Failed.” See http://www.english.illinois.edu/-people-/faculty/debaron/essays/epicene.htm. Earlier versions of this list appeared in “The Epicene Pronoun: The Word That Failed,” American Speech 56 (1981): 83–97; and Grammar and Gender (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986).
66 “spontaneously appeared in Baltimore”: See Elaine M. Stotko and Margaret Troyer, “A New Gender-Neutral Pronoun in Baltimore, Maryland: A Preliminary Study,” American Speech 82, no. 3 (2007): 262–79.
66 “that refer . . . to antecedents”: C. Marshall Thatcher, “What Is ‘EET’? A Proposal to Add a Series of Referent-Inclusive Third Person Singular Pronouns and Possessive Adjectives to the English Language for Use in Legal Drafting,” South Dakota Law Review 59, no. 1 (2014): 79–89. “What Is Eet?” is viewable online at http://works.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1011&context=charles_thatcher.
66 “To talk of persons”: H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2nd ed., revised by Sir Ernest Gowers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 221.
67 “where the matter of sex”: Ibid., p. 404 (entry for “number,” 11).
68 “The aspirant can then sink”: Dwight Garner, “Creative Writing, via a Workshop or the Big City,” New York Times, Feb. 26, 2014.