Amo, Amas, Amat

…and All That, a book about Latin grammar, is #4 #14 on Amazon in England.

Whoa! Charlotte Higgins explains all in the Guardian:

A clue to a reason for the success of Amo, Amas, Amat is also provided by Amazon, which has nominated as the volume’s “perfect partner” Beyond Words, John Humphrys’ cross book about the use of English in today’s degenerate world. In other words, Amo, Amas, Amat is, broadly, part of the Eats, Shoots and Leaves phenomenon and thus falls into the category of books that are ostensibly cris de coeur for the correct use of the apostrophe, say, while really, deep down, betraying a sort of posh anxiety about standards in society generally.

I’ll buy that. The really sad thing about it is that this book’s predecessor in the status anxiety sweepstakes, Eats, Shoots and Leaves—a massive hit and runaway bestseller a few years ago—was a wretched piece of shit from a professional point of view, as Louis Menand wrote memorably in the New Yorker.

The first punctuation mistake in “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” (Gotham; $17.50), by Lynne Truss, a British writer, appears in the dedication, where a nonrestrictive clause is not preceded by a comma. It is a wild ride downhill from there. “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” presents itself as a call to arms, in a world spinning rapidly into subliteracy, by a hip yet unapologetic curmudgeon, a stickler for the rules of writing. But it’s hard to fend off the suspicion that the whole thing might be a hoax.

The foreword, by Frank McCourt, contains another comma-free nonrestrictive clause (“I feel no such sympathy for the manager of my local supermarket who must have a cellarful of apostrophes he doesn’t know what to do with”) and a superfluous ellipsis. The preface, by Truss, includes a misplaced apostrophe (“printers’ marks”) and two misused semicolons: one that separates unpunctuated items in a list and one that sets off a dependent clause. About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes.

Ouch. Lynne Truss cried all the way to the bank.
But back to Amo, Amas, Amat. The Guardian piece is worth a read, even if just for this bit about the value of studying Latin.

Latin is about being thrown a passage you have never seen before and being asked to decode it - there’s still much more risk attached than there is with other subjects. Even the really clever [students] come up against something they just can’t do immediately, something that’s really tricky. And it’s good for them.”

Then there’s the literature. …[P]upils become mini-classicists. It’s got it all, really. It gives them a better English vocabulary, it helps them read English, especially English poetry, more analytically, because they are used to close study of passages, and then you are reading Virgil - really hardcore literature.”

I’ll vouch for that. I took four years of Latin. It was great, for all those reasons.

Veni, vidi, vinci. vici.