Memoir Meets Grammar Guide In Copy Editor's New Book
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- You might expect a book that's part memoir and part guide to grammar and usage to be sleep inducing.
Not Mary Norris' book, "Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen," published by W.W. Norton & Co.
Precise comma placement is a point of pride at The New Yorker magazine, where Norris is a kind of super copy editor.
"Once somebody called us prose godesses," Norris told WCBS 880's Jane Tillman Irving. "I like that a lot. So a comma queen is a more mortal form of a prose goddess."
In the book, Norris explains the "who"/"whom" conundrum, the "that" vs. "which" dilemma, where to put the apostrophe in the plural possessive and, of course, why it is correct to say "between you and me."
"It's prescriptive grammar, trying to explain things in a way that is entertaining enough for people to learn them without pain," Norris said.
And it's part memoir, with ruminations about her brother's sex change and the all-important editors' pencils distributed every day at The New Yorker.
"It was a beautiful site," Norris said. "The office boy, as he was called, with his tray of pencils, beautifully sharpened, and he would collect your old ones, your dull pencils, and you would grab a bunch of freshly sharpened pencils."
That tradition is now gone.