- Truss, Lynne.
Talk to the Hand.
London: Profile Books, 2005.
ISBN 1-86197-933-9.
-
Following the runaway success of
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
(January 2004),
one might have expected the author to follow up with another
book on grammar, but instead in this outing she opted to confront
the “utter bloody rudeness of everyday life”. Not long ago
I might have considered these topics unrelated, but after
the publication in July 2005 of
Strike
Out,
and the
subsequent discussion
it engendered, I've come to
realise that slapdash spelling and grammar are, as
explained on page 23 here, simply one aspect of the
rudeness which affronts us from all sides. As
Bernard Pivot
observed, “[spelling] remains a
politeness
one owes to our language, and a politeness one owes to those to
whom one writes.”
In this book Truss parses rudeness into six categories, and
explores how modern technology and society have nearly erased the
distinctions between private and public spaces, encouraging or
at least reducing the opprobrium of violating what were
once universally shared social norms. (Imagine, for example,
how shocking it would have seemed in 1965 to
overhear the kind of intensely personal or confidential
business conversation between two fellow passengers on
a train which it is now entirely routine to hear
one side of as somebody obliviously chatters into their
mobile phone.)
Chapter 2, “Why am I the One Doing This?”, is 23 pages
of pure wisdom for designers of business systems, customer
relations managers, and designers of user interfaces for
automated systems; it perfectly expresses the rage which
justifiably overcomes people who feel themselves victimised for
the convenience and/or profit of the counterparty in a
transaction which is supposedly of mutual benefit. This is a
trend which, in my opinion (particularly in computer user
interface design), has been going in the wrong direction since I
began to rant about it
almost twenty years ago.
A U.S edition is also available.
December 2005 