I have a problem...

Grammar Girl,
I just subscribed to your podcast and love it. I have something that has irked me for a while now and was hoping to get your view on it. Perhaps I'm in the minority on this one, but shouldn't Starbucks have an apostrophe? A case study I found states that the coffee chain's name is taken from Captain Ahab's "coffee-loving first mate in Herman Melville's Moby Dick" (company background, par. 1). I do not recall, having read the novel a couple times, there being more than one first-mate named Starbuck aboard the Peaquod. Wouldn't grammatical common sense dictate that the company name should suggest possession of coffee and not plurality of coffee-drinking seamen? Incidentially, this has not deterred my Venti-a-day caffeine habit (but I have drawn an apostrophe on my cup more than once.)

Thanks,
Meredith Jones

(p.s. Should "Vent-a-day" be hypenated?)

What I do on coffee breaks

Dear Moveon.org,

I enjoy getting e-mails from moveon.org, but do you think you could bring a (perhaps another) copy editor on staff?

"Today's news took even McCain's biggest admirers by surprise. In fact, we just 'found' an amazing video from Billy Mires, the 'real' bus driver of the Straight Talk Express reacting to McCain's impressive technological feat."

The quotations used to set off found and real are correctly used. The wink to the audience that this is a joke is made apparent by their inclusion. However, "watch Billy's video and spread the word by becoming his 'fan' on Facebook?" is a perfect example of when not to use quotation marks. You're neither quoting, as fan is not used sarcastically (presumably), nor is it quoted (rather, in the context, it does not require quotation.)

Please forgive my momentary English-major rage. I wouldn't point it out, but you guys don't want to end up here. I'll gladly continue to read your e-mails and pass them along to friends.

-Meredith

I realize that there are better ways to spend my time. But this was cathartic.

Books I did not finish the first time...

Despite being a perpetual listmaker, I've posted nary a to-do list on this blog. In an effort to remedy that (and in honor of being oh-so-close-to-done with Jane Eyre):

10 Books I Did Not Finish the First Time, 2 Books I Did Not Finish the Second Time and 1 Book I've read so many times I lost count/am embarrassed to admit:*

1. The Great Gatsby-F. Scott Fitzgerald (first assigned in the 9th grade.)
2. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man- James Joyce (12th grade, I've since read it twice despite not particularly liking it.)
3. The Picture of Dorian Gray- Oscar Wilde
4. Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte (summer reading list, 4th grade. Still reading.)
5. Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen (I tried reading this so many, many times.)
6. Heart of Darkness- Joesph Conrad (12th grade. Junior year. It was only 70 pages, why didn't I read it back then?)
7. Cat's Cradle- Kurt Vonnegut (not his best work. Comparatively, I read Slaugterhouse-Five in a single sitting. I only got two hours of sleep the night before 9th grade started.
8. Handmaid's Tale- Margaret Atwood (I think I took this out of the library three times before actually finishing it.)
9. Atonement- Ian McEwen (Cheated. Got it at audible.com. Started on a cartrip back to Radford. Finished it by taking Bagel on hour-long walks for the rest of the week in 30 degree weather. She did not complain.)
10. King Lear- Shakespeare (My 12th teacher kept referring to King Lear's classic hubris as "a problematic first example of Modern Man's tempestuous struggle with the rest of the world." There are many things wrong with that sentence--namely, it's bullshit. Lear's tempest was of his own making, he's no more an example of modernism than Oedipus or Jason. Asshole.)
11. Ulysses-James Joyce. (Giant, fuckin' accomplishment the first time. Mini accomplishment in the next go round)
12. Catcher in the Rye- J.D. Salinger. (First time I read this, it changed my life. Second time, I threw it against the wall. You have to be in a very particular place to read this book. I call it the 1oth grade.)
13. Bridget Jones's Diary- Helen Fielding (I read it when I don't feel like thinking and nothing is on television. Has not stopped being funny.)


*in that order

obligatory 9/11 post. Please ignore.

On the way home from yoga this evening I did not expect to start crying because of a segment on emergency preparedness. Coming home from work today, packed tightly on to the metro because there had been a delay, I read my book--like I do every other day-- but my head wasn't all in it, trying to drown out the noise of other people on their cell phones.

Downstairs, mom is watching another in a seven-year string of 9/11 specials and I went upstairs because I still can't figure out how either tower came down, even though I watched it all happen in class. This one is new, they've compiled video from what people shot that day. The plane hitting the second tower, people jumping out of windows, scared co-eds filing into an elevator because this just might be the end of the world. One clip was a little girl looking out an apartment window, asking her father where the building went. It takes children years to think abstractly.  Then there are the people covered in ash after the two buildings came down. They don't react to anything, just walk around in the cloud explaining to one another what just happened. As if the act of saying out loud what you cannot fully comprehend will make it tangible. As if it could ever be anything but completely unreal. 

What gets me is the paper. The raining ,ticker-tape parade of paper coming out of the towers. Entire histories falling down. Companies. Just sprinkling down. How the paper is still here but people had to bury wallets and watches. 

What isn't on tape is a girl named Olga walking into Mr. Smith's theatre room and saying should could not audition for  Medea that afternoon. Her father worked in the 2nd tower (maybe the 1st?) and she had to find out what happened. There was the line of kids, because we did not all have cell phones, waiting to use the office phones because a brother or a father or a sister worked at the Pentagon. 

The shirt I wore to school that day said Make Love, Not War. Why is that what I remember? 

They cut the feed to news stations after the towers fell. We all had to go back to class. Most teachers gave up teaching, they either put in movies or read aloud from what they could find online. My chemistry teacher asked us to open our textbooks and look at chemical structures. I watched the classroom door and saw Zach's head pop into view. We had an entire conversation in two looks. Mine wondering if he had any news on our other brother, Micah, who was taking his second flight ever, home from Florida and his that everything was fine but Ian was here to take us home.  When we got in the car all Ian said was, "aren't you glad Mom made an emergency contact?" We went to his house. Neither of us were hungry but we sat, watched the news and ate the brownies that Maggie had given me that morning. They were awful but at least it was something to do. 

This morning on NPR, the news caster speculated as to how many people had PTSD because of 9/11. I suppose that could be true of people who were there. Who lost someone. 

I suppose people might still wake up in the middle of the night because of it. I know it took me a while to get back to sleep. But I've always been like that. I never can sleep when something bothers me. Except I did fall asleep watching the news that afternoon. Ian and I both fell asleep on the floor of his apartment. After we finished off the brownies. We had to eat them dry because he had no milk. I remember thinking that he had grenadine, but no milk.  He'd just moved out of my parents' house.  I know I don't have it as uneasy as it all still makes me. The uneasiness is healthy I think. 

When I was very young, I used to have dreams that Dracula was hiding in the bathroom, behind the shoer curtain. That night, when I finally got to sleep, I had the dream again. Only this time it was Osama Bin Laden. I went down stairs after that and watched TV until I fell back asleep. Thankfully, Comedy Central was doing regular programming. No one else was. I should have written them a letter for that. 

While we were watching things tonight, my mom told me that she knows things are still ok because children are constantly being born. To her, that's proof that God wants us to go on about our lives. 

That made me want to cry too. 

I really didn't expect to start crying on the car ride home tonight.