Become a better cook

Ignores zero tolerance. :-)

"misplaced apostrophe (ãprintersâ marksä)"

It's correct as far as I can see: marks for printers, printers' marks. But my UK edition has neither forward nor preface so I buttume that the New Yorker is reviewing an American edition with American sensibilities.

"Parentheses are used, wrongly, to add independent clauses to the ends of sentences: ãI bought a copy of Eric Partridgeâs Usage and Abusage and covered it in sticky-backed plastic so that it would last a lifetime (it has)."

Well the remark is parenthetical. Perhaps American usage differs but that sentence is constructed in the way I was taught; the test being is the meaning changed if the parenthetical material were to be omitted entirely. Here it wouldn't be. Indeed my grammar teacher when reading out loud to us always omitted parenthetical matter which, if you were following the text, could be disconcerting if the pbuttage was long and your eye couldn't immediately pick up where the parenthesis ended and she'd continued reading.

"We are informed that when a sentence ends with a quotation American usage always places the terminal punctuation inside the quotation marks, which is not so. (An American would not write "Who said ÎI cannot tell a lie?â")

Missed point error. The terminal punctuation is the question mark and should be outside the quotation marks because the QM is the end of the question and so that phrase doesn't end with a quote. I said "I cannot tell a lie." Would be an apt example of American where English might have I said "I cannot tell a lie". Actually, I don't thinkIwould. However I haveHarte's Rulesand that says you may.

"The book also omits the serial comma, as in ãeats, shoots and leaves,ä which is acceptable in the United States only in newspapers and commercial magazines."

Oh lordy lor! I can pick any number of American authors from my shelves whose prose ifrifewith serial commas - Eats, shoots, and leaves? - so he's right there but unlike American in English omission is the norm, not a journalistic special circumstance.

I think Mr Louis Menand is being an arse - or butt maybe - and the New Yorker exhibiting its reputation for contentiousness at the expense of diligence.

Matthew