Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

Louis Menand, after listing some of the punctuation errors in Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss, a book about punctuation errors (a book that figures prominently in Mark Pilgrim's rant about the apostrophe): “Some people do feel this way, and they do not wish to be handed the line that “language is always evolving,” or some other slice of liberal pie. They don’t even want to know what the distinction between a restrictive and a non-restrictive clause might be. They are like people who lose control when they hear a cell phone ring in a public place: they just need to vent. Truss is their Jeremiah. They don’t care where her commas are, because her heart is in the right place.”

Much more than an article exposing a critic's failings, the article examines what writing was, is and what it is not. Things get really interesting when Menand talks about the differences between speech and writing and how comparing them (often by saying a writer has a particular "voice") is deeply flawed, because writing conveys much less information in terms of visual and audible clues than does speech. Speech is much more spontaneous than writing, Menand says, while writing is usually slaved over and perfected after drafting. And Seinfeld fans won't want to miss what Menand has to say about ripostes: George Costanza, if you'll remember the "jerk store" episode, would have identified with writers.