An excerpt from Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. It's an acerbic, very British book about people being snarky about proper punctuation... and it's about as witty and funny as a grammar book could ever be (and of course was written by a British lady).

This is the passage that completely sold me on the book:

Churchill said hyphens were "a blemish, to be avoided wherever possible". Yet there will always be a problem about getting rid of the hyphen: if it's not extra-marital sex (with a hyphen), it is perhaps extra marital sex, which is quite a different bunch of coconuts. ... The two hundred odd members of the Conservative Party would be lost without it.

There you go. Indulging in my grammar nerdiness. I also helped proof a bunch of my colleagues' descriptions of their term projects. Just wait a few years and I'll be a mad crusader online, or running around my school after class demanding to see that my students' text messages are grammatically correct...

Labels: books, grammar, joke, obsession, school