Mary Norris Quotes & Sayings

Nobody knows everything-one of the pleasures of language is that there is always something new to learn-and everybody makes mistakes. — Mary Norris

On the printed page, it's best to have everything - you know, to still mind your P's and Q's, dot your I's and cross your T's, yes. — Mary Norris

Many survivors refuse to talk about what they went through but I've never been ashamed to have been in one of those places. The shame is not mine; the church should be ashamed. They say now they're sorry - what they mean is, sorry they were found out. — Mary Norris

I have to admit that as a copy editor I agree with the conservatives - my job is to do no harm. But as a person - and as a writer and reader - I am all over the place. — Mary Norris

In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process. — Mary Norris

Because English has so many words of foreign origin, and words that look the same but mean something different depending on their context, and words that are in flux, opening and closing like flowers in time-lapse photography, the human element is especially important if we are to stay on top of the computers, which, in their determination to do our job for us, make decisions so subversive that even professional wordsmiths are taken by surprise. — Mary Norris

I can't help but think that the way we punctuate now is the right way - that we are living in a punctuation renaissance. — Mary Norris

Punctuation is a deeply conservative club. It hardly ever admits a new member. — Mary Norris

Whom" may indeed be on the way out, but so is Venice, and we still like to go there. — Mary Norris

The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around. — Mary Norris

Everybody is a writer. Everybody uses e-mail and has Facebook pages and tweets. — Mary Norris

A writer friend who was born in England summed up her feelings for the semicolon in a remark worthy of Henry James: "There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semicolon." I guess the opposite of that is that there is no displeasure so obtuse as that of an ill-placed semicolon. — Mary Norris

The better the writer, the more complicated the dangler. — Mary Norris

Benjamin Franklin, who was already in his eighties when he befriended Webster, and who advocated spelling reform, had encouraged the younger man to adopt his ideas. Franklin proposed that we lose c, w, y, and j; modify a and u to represent their different sounds; and adopt a new form of s for sh and a variation on y for ng as well as tweak the h of th to distinguish the sounds of "thy" and "thigh," "swath" and "swathe." If Franklin had had his way, he would have been the Saint Cyril of America - Cyril "perfected" the Greek alphabet for the Russian language; hence the Cyrillic alphabet - and American English would look like Turkish. — Mary Norris

The comma, if it's left out, sometimes can be a problem. There's a slogan on a T-shirt going around that "Let's Eat, Grandma," and "Let's Eat Grandma." — Mary Norris

Sing in me, o Muse, of that small minority of men who are secure enough in their masculinity to use the feminine third-person singular! — Mary Norris

Commas, like nuns, often travel in pairs. — Mary Norris

Something there is in cyberspace that doesn't love an apostrophe. — Mary Norris

First we get the rocks out, Alice. Then we get the pebbles out. Then we get the sand out, and the writer's voice rises. No harm done. — Mary Norris

One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience. — Mary Norris

Was it an insult to be called a "woman writer"? Didn't it have a taint of, say, the "woman driver"? — Mary Norris

Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar. — Mary Norris

There is a phase in the life of every copy editor when she is obsessed with hyphens. — Mary Norris

The image of the copy editor is of someone who favours a rigid consistency, a mean person who enjoys pointing out other people's errors, a lowly person who is just starting on her career in publishing and is eager to make an impression, or, at worst, a bitter, thwarted person who wanted to be a writer and instead got stuck dotting the i's and crossing the t's and otherwise advancing the careers of other writers. — Mary Norris

Muphry's Law: "If you write anything criticising editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written. — Mary Norris

The seven words George Carlin said you couldn't say on TV or radio ("fuck," "piss," "shit," "cunt," "motherfucker," "cocksucker," and "tits"). — Mary Norris

But good writers have a reason for doing things the way they do them, and if you tinker with their work, taking it upon yourself to neutralize a slightly eccentric usage or zap a comma or sharpen the emphasis of something that the writer was deliberately keeping obscure, you are not helping. In my experience, the really great writers enjoy the editorial process. They weigh queries, and they accept or reject them for good reasons. They are not defensive. The whole point of having things read before publication is to test their effect on a general reader. You want to make sure when you go out there that the tag on the back of your collar isn't poking up - unless, of course, you are deliberately wearing your clothes inside out. — Mary Norris

You cannot legislate language. Prohibition never worked, right? Not for booze and not for sex and not for words. — Mary Norris

The point is not to let the orthography distract the reader from the meaning. — Mary Norris

Fiddlesticks" is Scarlett O'Hara's way of saying "Fuck this shit. — Mary Norris

So many things in language can never be known or settled or explained, except by custom. — Mary Norris

The English language is full of words that are just waiting to be misspelled, and the world is full of sticklers, ready to pounce. — Mary Norris

A good dictionary can only help. — Mary Norris

I would never disable spell-check. That would be hubris. Autocorrect I could do without. — Mary Norris

If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic. — Mary Norris

Back in the twentieth century, we thought that robots would have taken over by this time, and, in a way, they have. But robots as a race have proved disappointing. Instead of getting to boss around underlings made of steel and plastic with circuitry and blinking lights and tank treads, like Rosie the maid on The Jetsons, we humans have outfitted ourselves with robotic external organs. Our iPods dictate what we listen to next, gadgets in our cars tell us which way to go, and smartphones finish our sentences for us. We have become our own robots. — Mary Norris

Melville has his tics, but he always put his words in the right order. Once you fall under the spell of the writer, you look past those ticks because you are more interested in what the writer says than judging how well he grasped the editorial conventions of his time. — Mary Norris

Why, if there is alphabet soup, do we not have punctuation cereal? — Mary Norris

Some women bristle, in certain contexts, at being called female: it seems to focus exclusively on the reproductive system, and makes you feel like a chicken, all thighs and breasts. — Mary Norris

It's "I felt bad," not "I felt badly," because "to feel badly" would mean "to grope about ineptly." The verb "felt" - definitely a verb of the senses, though not on Gordon's list - fuses the "bad" to the subject, rather than simply using an adverb to modify itself. — Mary Norris

Has the casual use of profanity in English reached a high tide? That's a rhetorical question, but I'm going to answer it anyway: Fuck yeah. — Mary Norris

One bad habit Teall wishes to cure us of right away is mistreating the hyphen by putting it between an adverb ending in ly and a participle. His example is a headline: "Use of 'Methodist' Is Newly-Defined." Lavishing sympathy on the hyphen, he laments, "Did you ever see a hyphen more completely wasted? A hyphen more unnecessarily and fruitlessly employed?" Even — Mary Norris

There is no pleasure so acute as that of a well-placed semi-colon. (the author is actually quoting a friend here) — Mary Norris

It is just possible that feminists have been literal-minded and, in pursuit of a political goal, have lost their sense of humour. — Mary Norris