Books and stuff
I'm currently reading The First Word - The Search for the Origins of Language by Christine Kenneally, which is turning out to be a fascinating read. The Amazon page probably gives a better summary than I did, but it's a great intro book into the origins of human language for someone who's interested in historical linguistics, but isn't necessarily knowledgeable about all the linguistic terminology and theories.
While reading it, I was studying grammar patterns and sentence construction as well, which I usually do while reading a book. Mostly, I try to notice how different authors use the elusive semicolons and such, and how they put their sentences, paragraphs and overall thoughts together to help my own writing. This is not the subject matter of the book, by the way, just me studying the writing as well as the content.
Anyway, this led me, by stream of consciousness, to think about aspects of proper writing in English that bug me. I guess it wasn't totally unrelated, since one of the points touched on in the book is how many grammars are a byproduct of language being used by something as imperfect as humans, and as such artifacts make it into our textbooks about how English should be written.
I seem to have a particular gripe about capital letters in the middle of sentences:
1. All quotes should start with a capital letter, even if they appear in the middle of sentences. I don't understand this, since the quotes already indicate that here comes a quotation.
Example: "I never imagined," she said breathlessly, "That they made them that big!"
Example: According to this fictional biologist, "On a gorilla, you'd think it'd be bigger."
The damn capitals are ruining my sentence! Or have I misunderstood a rule somewhere?
2. Why are adjectives indicating nationality capitalized?
Example: Though anyone Norwegian favor rakfisk as their universally objectionable dish of choice, those of a Swedish persuasion stand by their surströmming.
I realize that the countries' names should be capitalized as proper nouns, but why is it necessary for the adjectives as well? In Norwegian, we only capitalize the proper nouns. I am "norskamerikansk' and they're 'svenske'.
Am I the only one that has these pet peeves? Or do you have others like it? Or am I just being excessively nerdy? I know that there are several literary types that at least have me on their friends list (whether you actually read these posts or not), so I'm hoping I'm not the only one. Sometimes I think the written word suffers from being such an artificial construct, but I guess that may be the reason why so many authors have gone their own way anyway.
Oh, and if I rant about grammar only to leave behind some horrid examples of my own, always feel free to correct them. I live to learn. ;)