Between You and Me

Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen by Mary Norris
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I thought for awhile that being an editor would be the perfect job. I love words, and stories and even grammar. But I realize after reading this book that my enthusiasm for inane details would have to get downright obsessive to be any good at being an editor. Also, being an editor in New York (and for the New Yorker, at that) sounds like a glamorous job, but is in fact, the dullest job in the world. Unless you get jacked about catching a spelling error, or a comma error (these are made into several page long anecdotes); or you write letters to pencil companies inquiring why a batch turned out inferior, or you write authors to ask why three commas were misplaced; or if you would be amazed to discover there is an actual pencil sharpener museum, go out of your way to see it, and then give them your own trusty sharpener to add to the collection. The most exciting part of her day seems to be moving her car back and forth on road washing days. There may have been a few times I smiled and a couple of interesting grammar facts I learned, but grammar books themselves may be more interesting.


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Our iPods dictate what we listen to next, gadgets in our cars tell us which way to go, and smartphones finish our sentences for us. We have become our own robots.

Uxorious,” meaning “excessively attentive to one’s wife. (I once asked a married man if there was a word for a woman who was excessively attentive to her husband, and he said, “Yes: wonderful.”)

The subjective, or nominative, pronouns are: I, you, he/ she/ it, we, you, they.  "Who” is used when the pronoun is the subject or a predicate nominative, and “whom” when it’s a direct object, an indirect object,
"who” and “whom” are standing in for a pronoun: “who” stands in for “he, she, they, I, we”; “whom” stands in for “him, her, them, me, us.”