A grammar queen’s greek odyssey

Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen By Mary Norris R344 at Loot

LECTURING people on their grammar is rarely the way to their hearts.

Yet, in 2015, Mary Norris soared to popularity speaking out on dangling participles in

Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen,

an account of her years on the New Yorker’s copy desk. Along with her book, she has appeared in a series of videos for the magazine and her wit is on full display even in the episodes’

titles:

If Less Is More, Sometimes Fewer Is Better; The Lay of the Lie/Lay Land; An Episode of Diaeresis.

Now the comma queen is back, this time exploring the language of Euripides and Plato. Her new book,

is a rapturous memoir of falling in love with a language.

The book opens with an invocation. “Sing in me, O Muse,” she writes in high Homeric style, “of all things Greek that excite the imagination and delight the senses and magnify the lives of mortals.” But the weighty mood soon gives way to the buoyant: “If that’s not too much to ask, Muse. Please?”

It’s a shift typical of this lively book. From the first page, Norris reassures

Greek to Me, readers who fear they’re about to inhale 3 000 years of dust. She takes us on a tour of the alphabet and points out myths and histories. Aeschylus, she notes, “attributes the alphabet to Prometheus”, who stole it from the gods along with fire. She sneaks us into frat houses, revealing the stories behind their mottos.

Norris is at her best when discussing how words shape our experience and perceptive about the way language has coloured her life.

“Greek has been my salvation,” she writes. “Whenever I have been away from Greek for a while and come back to it, it revives something in me… Because the earliest writing to survive was epic poetry, which invokes the gods, writing connects us earthlings to eternity.” |