Clingfilm.
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Those sheep are creepy!
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I am with folk about the creepy sheep
The birds and hares however are beautiful and a clever use of old forks as birdie feets
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I adore the itchy nose
We have a resident hare in our wildlife reserve that was a splendid garden but it has become my own wildlife reserve with bats frogs hare common lizards owls pheasants foxes tiny shrews and all sorts of birds
I love it like that
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I shouldn’t laugh (but I did), my commas do (and also don’t) appear rather at random unless I’m concentrating. And I hardly ever concentrate.
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I try to think about punctuation but mostly I think about what I am trying to type words not gibbbbericshhh like that
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One can have fun trying to work out how to rescue that, and also how it happened. Someone was desperate to avoid an “Oxford comma” (or “Harvard comma” or “serial comma”) without knowing quite what that is nor when you are allowed to use it to avoid ambiguity, I suspect.
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My guess for “how” would be slavishly following a style guide. And while I’d be inclined to use the comma, simply moving the vigilante first would help a lot.
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For lack of a comma the sense was lost.
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I also feel a definite article in there might have helped.
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Well, yes, I would tend to refer to the Shah not just Shah.
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Putting a comma after vigilante would only mean that Sylvia Plath was a New York vigilante, but not Shah of Iran, wouldn’t it? Thus:
“The latest historical fiction books take inspiration from Sylvia Plath, a New York vigilante, and Shah of Iran”
(And I agree it should be ‘the Shah’)
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Yes; I suspect that may be a style guide thing as well. (As when one asks Ukrainians and not Russians, they prefer Ukraine to The Ukraine, and most news outlets have switched.)
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One of the animals I loathe the most is a dumb American armed with a style guide.
No good ever comes of an encounter with such.
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I had a wonderful experience this week; an American friend who is an author had written "may as well” where I would use “might as well”; the sentence was “the terrace, onto which the windows opened, may as well have been a marketplace”. So I pointed this out, because it is not yet published so there was some point in proofing. She thought it over, discussed it with a friend, consulted online sources, and decided that I was right that (quoting her) “may” is for more possible outcomes and “might” is for more unlikely hypotheticals. “If no one’s coming to my birthday party, I may as well eat the cake.” Versus: “If the bus doesn’t show up in another five minutes, I might as well fly home.”
And she added, “Now that I have a sense of the distinction, I may as well use it.”
Yay! Small victories weigh heavily at the moment.
My favourite bloomer with those two, of course, was in the BBC report about a cricketer who had been hit in the head and killed by a fast ball. I quote: “He was not wearing a helmet, which may have saved his life.”
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For the avoidance of doubt, this should not be taken to suggest I believe all Americans to be dumb, merely that the dumb ones with a style guide are an absolute menace (and probably responsible for about 2.5% of my grey hairs. ‘Yes, grey with a feckin’ E; this is published in the UK.’ You utter moron.)
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An editorial assistant with a style guide and a plan?
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