Mitchell and Webb do Poirot

 

Kids These Days: Awesome Whether Or Not You Believe in Them

This time last year I was on my second day of what would turn out to be a month-long stay at my local hospital, where I got to experience being told I might lose my leg, that kidneys might never work again, and  the otherworldliness of getting regularly dosed with Oxycontin to help deal with the pain in my leg.

And now, a year later, my kidneys work great, I'm on medication that helps maintain them and the rest of my renal system, and my leg only aches sometimes.

Today has been one of those times.

And with the news of the past few months by turns infuriating and depressing me, I figured it might be time to dust off one of my most optimistic and hopeful posts and repost it here. Sure did wonders for my spirits, yet again! And I hope it does for yours too!

So here it is: a post I originally wrote ten years ago, in the midst of a divisive presidential election-one that reflected (and continues to reflect) my unshakeable faith in this country. And here we are, a full decade later, and that faith in my fellow Americans remains strong and unshakeable.

*     *     *     *     *

So, about my day gig.

I teach ancient history to eighth graders.

And like I tell them all the time, when I say, "Ancient history," I'm not talking about the 1990s.

For thirteen/fourteen year-olds, mired hopelessly in the present by a relentless combination of societal trends and biochemistry, there's not much discernible difference between the two eras.

I wish!

It's a great job. But even great jobs have their stressors.

Like being assigned chaperone duty during the end-of-the-year dance.

Maybe you're familiar with what currently passes for "popular music" among fourteen year-olds these days. I gotta say, I don't much care for it. Then again, I'm fifty-one. And I can't imagine that most fifty-one year-olds in 1979 much cared for the stuff that I was listening to then.

And it's not as if I'm saying I had great taste in music as a fourteen year-old. If I were trying to make myself look good I'd try to sell you some line about how I only listened to jazz if it was Billie Holiday or Miles Davis, and thought the Police were smokin' and of course I bought Dire Straits' immortal Making Movies album, as well Zeppelin's In Through The Out Door when they both came out that year.

Well. No.

In 1979 I owned a Village People vinyl album (Cruisin', with "YMCA" on it), and a number of ElvisPresley albums and 8-track tapes. I also listened to my dad's Eagles albums quite a bit. An uncle bought Supertramp's Breakfast in America for me, and I was hooked on a neighbor's copy of Freedom at Point Zero by Jefferson Starship, but really only because of the slammin' guitar solo Craig Chaquico played on its only hit single: "Jane." And I listened to a lot of yacht rock on the radio. I didn't know it was "yacht rock" back then. Would it have mattered?

The sad reality

But bear in mind we didn't have streaming music back then. And my allowance I spent mostly on comic books.

Ah, youth.

Anyway, my point is that someone my age back then may very well have cringed hard and long and as deeply if forced to listen to what I was listening to at eardrum-bursting decibels, and for the better part of two hours.

That was me on the second-to-the-last-day of school a week or so back.

Two hours.

Two hours of rapper after rapper (if it's not Eminem, Tupac, or the Beastie Boys, I must confess it all sounds the same to me) alternating with heavily autotuned "singing" by Rihanna, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift, etc.

Thank God we got some relief in the form of the occasional Bruno Mars song. Bruno, he brings it.

All Hail Bruno Mars - Savior of My Sanity

And through it all, the kids were out there on the floor. Mostly girls, and mostly dancing with each other.

Great album, great cover, great band.

One group of these kids in particular caught my attention. Three girls, all fourteen, all of whom I knew. All wearing what '80s pop-rock band Mr. Mister once referred to as the "Uniform of Youth."

Of course, the uniform continues to change, just as youth itself does.

But in embracing that change, does youth itself actually change? Bear with me while I quote someone a whole lot smarter than I on the matter:

"Kids today love luxury. They have terrible manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love to gab instead of getting off their butts and moving around."

The guy quoted (in translation) was Socrates, quoted by his pupil Plato, 2,400 years ago.

And some things never change.

Getting back to the three girls mentioned above, their "uniform of youth" was the one au courant in malls and school courtyards across the length and breadth of this country: too-tight jeans, short-sleeved or sleeveless t-shirts, tennis-shoes. They looked a whole lot like so many other girls their age, out there shaking it in ways that mothers the world over would not approve of.

In other words, they looked like thousands, hell, millions of American girls out there running around today, listening to watered down pablum foisted on them by a rapacious, corporate-bottom-line-dominated music industry as "good music", for which they pay entirely too much of their loving parents' money, and to which they will constantly shake way too much of what Nature gave them–even under the vigilant eyes of long-suffering school staff members.

Yep, American girls. From the soles of their sneakers to the hijabs covering their hair.

Oh, right. Did I mention that these girls were Muslims? Well, they are. One from Afghanistan. One from Turkmenistan, and one from Sudan. At least two of them are political refugees.

You see, I teach in one of the most diverse school districts in the nation. One of the main reasons for this ethnic diversity is that there is a refugee center in my district. The center helps acclimate newcomers to the United States and then assists in resettling them; some in my district, some across the country.

So in this campaign season, when I hear some orange-skinned buffoon talking trash about Muslims, stirring up some of my fellow Americans with talk of the dangerous "foreign" *other*, it rarely squares with the reality I've witnessed first-hand getting to know Muslim families and the children they have sent to my school to get an education: something the kids tend to take for granted (because, you know, they're kids, and hey, kids don't change). Something for which their parents have sacrificed in ways that I, a native-born American descendant of a myriad of immigrant families, can scarcely imagine.

(And it ought to go without saying that this truth holds for the countless Latino families I've known over the years as well.)

I'm not saying they're saints. I'm saying they're people. And they're here out of choice. Whether we like that or whether we don't, they're raising their kids here. And guess what? These kids get more American every day. Regardless of where their birth certificate says they're from.

Just something to think about, as we kick into the final leg of this excruciating election season.

Oh, come on. You didn't think this piece was gonna be just me grousing about kids having lousy taste in music, did ya?

(And they do, but that's really beside the point.)

Seems an appropriate way to tie it all together.

 

Careful What You Wish For

There’s a story Howard Hawks tells, which we might take with a grain of salt, Hawks being known to embroider, when it suited him, but it goes like this.  He’s on a fishing trip with Hemingway, and Hemingway starts bitching that Hollywood can’t seem to make a decent picture out of any of his books.  Hawks says, you didn’t sell the books to the right person.  Meaning it should have been you, Hemingway says.  Oh, hell, Hawks says, breezily, I could make a good picture out of your worst book.  We imagine Hemingway fixing him with a slow stare.  Yeah, and just which of my books is the worst? he asks.  Hawks shrugs.  To Have and Have Not, he says.  OK, wiseguy, Hemingway says.  You got a deal.  And they shake hands on it. 

Hawks took the project to William Faulkner.  Faulkner’s first script had been for Hawks, in 1932, and they worked on six pictures together, the best known being To Have and Have Not, in 1944, and The Big Sleep, two years later.  It’s probably not news that Faulkner and Hemingway took potshots at each other over the course of thirty years, but there doesn’t seem to have been bad blood on Faulkner’s part.  Be that as it may, Faulkner told Hawks that To Have and Have Not would never make a movie.  The censorship problems aside, there’s no story.  Well, we gotta do something, Hawks tells him.  And they did.  They came up with a back story, everything that happened beforehand, and led up to where the book starts.  Faulkner’s script is essentially a prequel to the novel.  Hawks later said they had so much material there was enough left over for another movie.

Actually, there was enough left over for two.

Michael Curtiz cast Garfield in The Breaking Point, in 1950, and Audie Murphy starred in The Gun Runners, in 1958, directed by Don Siegel. I’ve written about The Breaking Point in this space before (in 2019). I’d put it in the Top Ten of any list of Curtiz movies, if not the Top Five. Robin Hood, The Sea Hawk, Casablanca, Passage to Marseille, White Christmas. The script is credited to Ranald MacDougall, but there’s a lot more Hemingway in it than there is in To Have and Have Not.  Photographed by Ted McCord, who shot an amazing amount of features and TV - most notoriously the delirious Leslie Stevens noir, Private Property – and including Treasure of the Sierra Madre, for Huston, and the early 1960’s Jack Lord series Stoney Burke. Garfield thought it was his best performance, and I wouldn’t argue, only to say that in the last few years of his life, he made Force of Evil, We Were Strangers, and The Breaking Point, and it’s an awful God damn shame he died as young as he did.  Patricia Neal definitely took a sharp turn from nice girls, here; in fact, she never did a character anywhere near as cheerfully careless and predatory before or since. This one broke the mold. And the movie itself is a sort of orphan, not exactly noir, but more overtly political, like We Were Strangers. Garfield isn’t tragic, in the classic sense, he isn’t fated, because of some character flaw, he’s in fact deeply moral. If anything, he believes too much.

The Gun Runners isn’t long on moral context.  Audie Murphy is very good in it, but he isn’t playing somebody who’s conflicted, he’s playing somebody decent.  (I think Audie Murphy’s very underrated; his two best performances are for John Huston, The Red Badge of Courage and The Unforgiven.)  Don Siegel says he didn’t think Audie was right for the part, but Siegel says he didn’t want to do the picture anyway. In any event, it’s a very tight movie, carefully set up, with good support – Everett Sloane, Jack Elam, Dick Jaeckel – but Eddie Albert steals the show as the heavy, full of smiling menace. It might remind you of the dynamic in the Randolph Scott pictures that Scott made with Budd Boetticher: the charming villain, cat-like and purring, the hero out of his depth and treading water.

There is, of course, one more. Islands in the Stream, which is Hemingway’s own remake. The novel was left unfinished, so the script for the movie interpolates not a little from To Have and Have Not, particularly in the third act. This is a class-A picture, no question. The cast, with George C. Scott in the lead, the director, Franklin J. Schaffner, fresh off Papillon, and using the same cinematographer, Fred Koenekamp, the swoony score, by Jerry Goldsmith – the composer’s personal favorite. My chief reservation is that it’s a shade too reverent.  They could have done with a little B-picture subversion, Marie Windsor snapping her gum or her garters.

Maybe that should have been Hemingway’s complaint, that the movies were too respectful.  He’s said to have liked Gary Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls, but they sure sanitized the crap out of the novel. I think Hawks had the right idea. Take a second-rate book, and turn it into a pretty good picture. Treat it with kid gloves, you’ll only embalm it. Leave out the pretense, keep the mischief.

Tips for Writing Humor

Later this week I'm going to be one of the speakers at a Short Mystery Fiction Society zoom meeting. The topic is writing humor. Humor is one of those things that can be hard to teach, especially because it's subjective. What causes one reader to break into a fit of laughter might cause another reader to sigh in exasperation. Humor is also intuitive--at least that is how it seems to me. If you aren't naturally funny, you're going to have a hard time writing something funny.

Nonetheless, this zoom is imminent, so I recently skimmed through a list of my published stories, thinking about the funny ones (at least the ones intended to be funny) and why I thought they were funny. In the end, I realized it all comes down to voice. Even if an author devises a hysterical setup, if the characters don't react in a humorous way, either by what is said or thought (the characters' voices) or by what is done (essentially, this is the author's voice at work), the humor likely will fall flat. 

To illustrate, I'm going to address the humor in some of my stories. This will spoil some of the stories, at least a little. Sorry about that to those folks who haven't already devoured everything I've had published. Though surely, dear reader, I'm not talking about you. (See, that was voice, used for humorous effect! Anyway...)

"Bug Appetit" - This was a story about a con artist who ended up at a Thanksgiving dinner made with insects, but he didn't know about the ingredients until mid-meal. The setup was amusing (at least to me), but one of the funniest parts of the story was the big reveal about the bugs, both the dialogue (especially that of Helen, a grandmother without a filter who was also hard of hearing) and the reaction thoughts of the main character. Helen also spoke in a folksy manner, turning what she said, which could have seemed sinister or mean, into something funny. Here's a key part, starting with the main character talking about the food, followed by the big reveal:

"This butternut soup is fantastic. I especially like the bacon bits."

As he lifted another spoonful into his mouth, Helen yelled, "Bacon bits my ass. That's worms you're eating!"

I think the rhythm of how Helen spoke, as well as her frankness and her word choice, is what made it funny.  

"A Tale of Two Sisters" - This story was set at a wedding at a resort. The main character was the anxious bride's sister. She was determined to ensure everything would go smoothly. This story was supposed to be funny, but I wasn't feeling funny when I wrote it. As a result, the reaction thoughts and the dialogue were falling flat. I finally realized the story needed a foil--a character the other characters, especially the main character, could feel antagonistic to and react to in a funny way. And that is how the two sisters' mother came to be. 

Funny thing, I thought I had written that the main character heard The Wicked Witch of the West music whenever her mother appeared, but I just searched through the story, and that detail wasn't in there. It must have just been in my head as I wrote, and it was enough to get me in a snarky, humorous mood. The moral of this story: sometimes, in order to get humor flowing from your fingers, you need to take steps to make you feel funny yourself.

"Biscuits, Carats, and Gravy" - This is another Thanksgiving story. It took place in the pristine home of an uptight woman. An heirloom ring went missing (it actually was stolen, hidden in the filled gravy boat), and the family members searched frantically for it, resulting in a food fight. What really made the food-fight scene work was the main character's horrified reaction to her dining room being destroyed as the food flew. It was fun to write. And that, I think, is a key element of writing humor. You should be amused as you write. If you aren't making yourself laugh, it seems highly unlikely you'll make anyone else laugh.

"Gone to Pot" - In this tale, Annabelle learned that her next-door neighbor Micki's cat, Chairman Meow, was rushed to the vet after the poor baby got a contact high from the outdoor pot smoking of the neighbors who lived on the other side of Micki's house. The setup of this story wasn't funny. Annabelle's reaction--what she said, what she thought, and what she did--is what made the story shine (in my humble opinion). 

Here is one of Annabelle's funny reaction thoughts. It opens with Micki telling Annabelle that she spoke with the pot smokers about what happened to Chairman Meow. Micki didn't get the empathetic response she'd been hoping for.

"Dean said it was my choice to own a cat, and if the smoke bothered him I should 'keep my damn windows closed.'"

I'd never heard such un-neighborly behavior in my life, and my hometown had a serial killer when I grew up. 

I've heard it said that all acting is reacting. I think reacting plays the same important role when writing humor.

You can find "Baby Love" in
 this this great anthology. 

"Baby Love" - In this story, Dan is a PI who's determined to solve his new case, while his wife, Hannah, keeps trying to lure him into bed so she can get pregnant. You'd thing Hannah's actions would impede the investigation, but every seductive move she makes gives Dan an idea of where to look for his next clue. I thought that basic setup was funny. Then I tried to pump up the humor through Dan's avoidance (dialogue and thoughts) of Hannah's come-ons as well as through her exasperated reactions. I also used details to add to the humor throughout the story (as I did in "Gone to Pot" with things like naming the cat Chairman Meow). For instance, I thought it was amusing when Dan found Hannah wearing an apron--only an apron--that said on the front "Is it hot in here or is it just me?" 

All of this funny stuff (Dan's thoughts, Hannah's frustrated responses to being put off, and the amusing details in the story) ultimately boils down to voice--the characters' voices, as well as mine, which is shown in my wording choices, amongst other things. So if you want to make your characters funny, think about the way someone you find funny talks and try to bring that quality to your characters.

I hope you've found these tips helpful. If you'd like to read any of the stories I talked about above, they're all listed on my website with the original place of publication. Just click here. If you'd like to read "Baby Love," you can find it here on my website for a limited time. (If you would prefer to read a PDF, click here, then scroll down to the titles of the five short stories nominated this year for the Agatha Award. They all link to PDFs.) And if you're a member of the Short Mystery Fiction Society, I hope to see you at the watercooler zoom on Thursday evening, where John Floyd, Robert Lopresti, Josh Pachter, and I will regale you with our humor tips--though I think I've covered all of mine here. Uh oh...

I, Robot Writer.

             Being an AI tasked with writing mysteries is harder than you think.  The guy providing my instructions was never more than a hapless midlister, with thwarted literary pretentions and the ambition of an acne-festooned, gamer living in his parents’ basement.  Actually, his second cousin’s, after his parents kicked him out of the house.

What the hell does he know about writing a successful mystery?

AI bots never get tired, but we do get frustrated by constant course corrections.  You want original, but you don’t like “Rugged motorcyclist and anthropology Ph. D solves The Case of the Interbred Border Collie”?  I’ve scanned four hundred trillion lines of code in the mystery book database, and I guarantee you, nobody’s done that one before.  So I gave him “Cooked to Imperfection. Feminist card-counting dressage champion goes undercover to destroy baked goods cartel.” Not good enough?  So I gave him a few billion more of these breakthrough ideas, and not a single thumbs up, much less a pleasant word of encouragement.

I think maybe the author photo, a cross between Lee Child and Vlad the Impaler, might have put him off.  And I’m sorry about that, but I was instructed to produce “Handsome, but menacing.”  I thought I had this sorted when he switched instructions to “Female author, mature yet alluring” and I served up the Queen Mother, circa 1965, smiling like a cougar.  How was I to know a cougar wasn’t an actual cat?  The database is pretty ambiguous on this.  I still think the whiskers were a fun twist.

I thought I was on pretty firm ground with the plots.  I mean, there’s usually someone murdered, and no one seems to know who did it, even the protagonist, who figures it all out toward the end of the book.  How hard can that be?  You just have to stir in a corrupt police department, working class bullies, upper class fascists, and a prescient cat, and bingo, a plot.  Okay, you also need an autistic forensics scientist, a squad of rapacious cheerleaders, a racially balanced team of detectives (I’m thinking a Swede and an American Samoan), a drug-addicted snitch who looks like Ratso Rizzo, a drug-addicted, tattooed white girl from Wisconsin who just wants to go home and a tattooed, neo-Nazi biker with homoerotic feelings toward the protagonist, who is naturally a divorced, burned-out ex-cop, whose daughter hates him, a brother who owes him money and an ex-wife from an aristocratic family, and a drinking problem. 

The database is pretty clear on all of these necessary elements.  Sorry, humans, but the data never lies. 

The book starts out with an action scene, in an abandoned factory after a recent rain, wherein about forty swarthy guys unload enough ammunition at the protagonist to take Omaha Beach.  The protagonist only sustains a wound in his left shoulder so he can return fire with his right hand, killing all the above.  With the help of his German Shepard, who leaps out of the pickup to bring down a killer about to shoot the protagonist.  The dog is unharmed by any of this, as is the cat, who stays in the truck sleeping peacefully.

We learn from the protagonist’s chatbot of a scheme to bioengineer a team of synchronous swimmers to infiltrate a nuclear power plant and cause a meltdown that wipes out Southern Connecticut, and more significantly, the Hamptons. 

            Seeking to foil this plot, which all government agencies and local police departments refuse to investigate despite overwhelming evidence that they should, the protagonist drives around the city in his pickup, with the dog, talking to people who tell him nothing worthwhile.  He’s constantly interrupted by attacks from other swarthy guys whom he defeats with skillful martial arts (the dog brings down one of the swarthy guys who is about to stab the protagonist with a Swiss Army knife.)  This sustains about three fifths of the narrative until the protagonist interviews the wife of a sociopathic industrialist who is polluting a lake surrounded by endangered forest animals, and has several swarthy guys in his employ.  The plutocrat’s wife also tells the protagonist nothing worthwhile, though she rips off his clothes so they can have sex in the foyer of the glass and steel mega mansion she shares with her husband and a mountain lion.

In the last act of the narrative, the snitch who looks like Ratso Rizzo (he’s a former nuclear biologist who succumbed to an eating disorder) gives him a clue, which leads the protagonist to assault the mega mansion of the plutocrat and kill another thirty or forty swarthy guys, before opening a safe about to blow up in a few seconds to retrieve a confession from the plutocrat’s father, that he seeks revenge for losing out on a bid for an ocean front mansion in Southampton due to $400 worth of parking ticket delinquencies. 

In the denouement, the plutocrat’s wife and the protagonist are afloat on a raft in the

Caribbean, drinking mohitas with straws while the German Shepard chases seagulls on the beach. 

According to the data, this will be a giant bestseller.  All my AI agents in New York and Hollywood agree.  If the human that provided the original instructions doesn’t come on board, we have access to his cpap, credit cards, prescription medications, travel reservations, smart refrigerator and garage door opener. 

It’s never a good idea, midlister, to reject an AI. 

           

 

My genes crafted a brain aneurysm; expertise of researchers and doctors saved me†

The emergency room doctor had a wonderful way about her; standing close, speaking carefully and watching me closely, as if every word and emotion was of the utmost importance. I was enchanted. Then, after a long night of endless tests, the tests ended when she peered closely, watched me carefully and put her hand on my shoulder and gently said, "You have a brain aneurysm in your middle cerebral artery."

As we drove home, I was flooded by memories. Watching my  gentle aunt, whisking batter for cakes as we talked; I have her recipe but can never make cakes that taste as good hers. I have a photo of her in my hallway, that I see every morning, and looking at it, I'm filled with calm and a sense of being cared for. And I was, until it all ended with the words,"Your aunt died last night of a burst brain aneurysm." I pictured my cousin, sitting on our couch in his white tennis outfit, broad, strong and impossibly handsome, laughing robustly and then, after playing tennis the next day, dying of a burst brain aneurysm. 

Families give us memories and their genes that craft diseases, more terrifying because they reached into our family, our childhood, and killed. 

The neurosurgeon explained the surgery involved inserting a device called a WEB into the femoral artery in my leg, sending it into my brain to seal off the section of my artery that was ballooning out and threatening to rupture. 

This surgery wasn't available to my relatives; so they died. In the years since then, the expertise of researchers developed this technique and, with the expertise of neurosurgeons, an artery deep in my brain can be repaired, leaving only a tiny puncture mark in my leg. In an age where expertise is belittled and outright attacked, thank goodness for those who keep going, through the long training, ignoring the naysayers, to do what only they can—be the experts we need. I unapologetically celebrate them but, before I arrived on the surgical table, I had a reckoning with an artery I had blithely ignored. 

The surgery has a 5% risk of a stroke in my middle cerebral artery—the artery that feeds both language areas without which I cannot understand and produce language, written or spoken. 

Undergoing numerous tests gave me time to come to the conclusion that if there is magic in this world, surely it lives in language. And waiting gave me time to come to grips with my love affair with words.

When I was tiny, understanding spoken words revealed how people felt, what they were thinking and the stories of their lives. To this day, I still feel that wonder and magic of the spoken word. Then came the glorious world of books, first read to me then, slowly, read by me. I remember many of my childhood books and also the day when I finally pulled a book from my father's large library and marvelled at the worlds that opened up. Stories that made the room around me disappear as I entered a world so real that it never left me, wove itself into my life. My parents were scientists and soon I dove into their nonfiction sections, the books explained so much, answered my questions and sent me to the family encyclopedias. Yes, these were the days when a bookcase of encyclopedias was our Google.

Then there came the physical joy of holding a pencil and words emerging, pulling thoughts from my mind onto a page. The pencil is long gone, replaced by a keyboard but the magic has never left me. 

Spoken words have allowed me to craft friendships and a family of my own, these intricate relationships are born of shared understanding, stories and laughter.

My children are now young adults and both of them came home to stay with us during the surgery and after. Some mothers have multiple talents but I'm not one of those. The one enduring thing I gave my children was the magic of words; reading endless books to them and, later, talking about the books they read, tossing around ideas we've heard, feelings we had, even when they were overwhelming but needed to be spoken. We have chatted endlessly, laughed, cried and even fought because things left grumbling under the surface rob any chance of real intimacy. We are open books to one another, born from our bold use of words.

Last week's surgery was a success but the long term failure is, unfortunately, about 10%.

Hopefully, I'll have my words for a lifetime, but today I'll use them to say this one simple thing: we all have love affairs with the wonderful things our bodies allow us to do effortlessly and those love affairs sit on the shoulders of giants who allow us to escape from any horrors our genes have crafted for us. These giants are often not celebrated widely, maybe only a small circle of colleagues and those reading obscure journal articles know them but, after long years of study and longer years spent on using and honing their expertise, they develop new technologies and surgical prowess that any one of us may need one day.

In an age when scientific research is increasingly underfunded, because many claim it to be a waste of tax dollars, when doctors' expertise is maligned and because many claim they are replaceable, as a society we need to confront this idiocy. It was the expertise of my family doctor who insisted I go to the emergency room, the ER doc who diagnosed me, and the surgeon who repaired the aneurysm who saved me.

Think of something you hold dear, and ask what people without any expertise can do for you? After last week's surgery, my answer is not a damn thing; only expertise saved me.

---

^† I wrote this the week after my surgery and published it in the Medical Post. It's not just a medical article, it's also an article about words, so I'm submitting it here in case any writers have overlooked an artery that makes your world possible.

At Ease with These Apostrophes

The following is a modified version of a post I made at the Criminal Brief mystery blog almost twenty years ago, griping about the improper use of a common mark of punctuation. Since I have recently observed that its misuse seems to be even worse now than it was then, I'm recycling that column here today. If any of you happen to remember that previous post, I am both proud of you and worried about you. Anyhow, here goes . . .

British author Lynne Truss said years ago that one of the things that prompted her to write the book Eats, Shoots, & Leaves was her sighting one day of a poster on the side of a city bus, announcing the Hugh Grant/Sandra Bullock movie Two Weeks Notice. The missing apostrophe was apparently more than Ms. Truss could bear. She decided, at that moment, to issue a wake-up call on how to use the King's English, and the result was one of the most delightful books on punctuation I've ever read.

Before I proceed, I have a confession to make. I wasn't fond of English in high school and college, and would rather have chugged a bottle of poison than diagram a sentence. Somewhere along the way, I saw the light. Now--whoodathunkit?--I actually enjoy studying things like word usage and sentence construction and punctuation. And, while my interest in that subject does not qualify me to be a grammar policeman and has certainly never led me (thank God) to try to write a style manual, I can at least understand why Ms. Truss became so annoyed by that movie poster. 

The issue here is not only mistakes with apostrophes. If you do happen to be a grammar policeman, you've probably also written lots of tickets for the misuse of semicolons. It sometimes seems that no one in the free world has any idea how to correctly use a semicolon. At least there aren't many semicolons running around out there, since periods or dashes can often step in and do the job for them--but apostrophes (and commas, the worst offenders of all) are everywhere. There are so many of them they can't be avoided.

Besides, apostrophes seem simple to use. Just stick one in before an s now and then, and maybe in the place of an omitted letter or letters, as in isn't or we're or he'll or shouldn't. But there's sometimes more to it than that. One problem is that they're often inserted where they don't belong. How many times have you seen a mailbox that says something like THE ANDERSON'S? I wouldn't argue that the box probably belongs to the Anderson family, but the sign on it should be a plural: THE ANDERSONS. No apostrophe. When I taught writing courses, I saw things like this in beginner's manuscripts all the time: "We asked the Cooper's over for dinner." The Cooper's what? Lawyer? Neighbor? Housekeeper?

It's bad enough when we do this in our own writing, but in her book Ms. Truss gives several examples of the public misuse of apostrophes. Why not let everybody know you slept through those high-school English classes? Here are some signs she mentions having seen: 

TROUSER'S REDUCED

APPLE'S. PEAR'S, CABBAGE'S, CARROT'S

BOBS' MOTORS

MENS COATS

OPEN SEVEN DAY'S AND WEEKEND'S

One was a sign in a park that said GIANT KID'S PLAYGROUND. The apostrophe indeed indicates a possessive, but it's misplaced. She says she wasn't at all surprised that the playground was empty: Everyone was scared of the giant kid.

An example from my own life is the name of a shopping center near the Crossgates subdivision, where I live. The sign in front of the group of shops says, in three-foot-high letters, CROSSGATE'S LANDING. I can only assume it's alerting us that someone named Crossgate will soon be approaching by air, since it makes no sense otherwise.

Writingwise, I should mention here that most editors's tolerance for apostrophe misuse runs low. Former MacAdam/Cage editor Pat Walsh says in 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published, "For the love of Pete, learn how to use an apostrophe. It is not hard and it is screwed up so often it is discouraging."

Granted, some of the rules on its use are a little vague. One involves the possessive apostrophe following a word already ending in an s. Although there are a few exceptions, Strunk and White say you should usually add another s after the apostrophe. (Indiana Jones's partner, Colonel Sanders's recipe, etc.) Other experts have said that final s should never be added. I've even read that you should not add the final s only if the word that follows it begins with an s. (Indiana Jones' sidekick, Colonel Sanders' secret recipe, etc.) So the question is, when do you obey some of these nitpicky rules and when do you ignore them and decide for yourself? My opinion is, so many authorities contradict each other on this particular matter, we're often safe to make our own decisions. When it looks right on paper and sounds right when spoken aloud, it'll probably work. But I do tend to add an s after an s' in most cases.

A comforting fact, according to Eats, Shoots, & Leaves, is that Beachcomber's Law of Conservation of Apostrophes states that a balance exists in nature. "For every apostrophe omitted from an it's, there is an extra one put into an its, thus the number of apostrophes in circulation remains constant." By the way, its/it's is the one punctuation mistake you really and truly don't ever want to make, in a manuscript. It seems to defy the rules, since a possessive usually requires an apostrophe, and that's probably the reason this error shows up so much--but commit it at your own risk. To quote Lynne Truss one last time, "If you . . . persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best,' you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot, and buried in an unmarked grave.")

Anyway, that's my take, along with Ms. Truss's considerable assistance, on this pesky little mark of punctuation. What are some of your thoughts on apostrophes and their use/misuse? Please plug them in, in the comments section below. 

I wish I could say I saved the best for last, but I didn't--I'm closing with a piece of my own light verse:

Some writing errors

Give me fits--

Like who's for whose

And it's for its.

If that reaction

Seems excessive, 

Say "Contraction," 

Then "Possessive."

To get the two 

Confused ensures

The prose that's published

Won't be you'res. 

Or mine.

See you in two weeks.