The Deluxe Transitive Vampire: The Ultimate Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed - Hardcover

Gordon, Karen Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679418601 ISBN 13: 9780679418603

Publisher: Pantheon, 1993

Synopsis

Playful and practical, this is the style book you can't wait to use, a guide that addresses classic questions of English usage with wit and the blackest of humor. Black-and-white illustrations throughout.

About this title

About the Author

KAREN ELIZABETH GORDON is the author of The Deluxe Transitive Vampire, The New Well-Tempered Sentence, The Ravenous Muse, The Red Shoes and Other Tattered Tales, The Disheveled Dictionary, Paris Out of Hand, Torn Wings and Faux Pas, and Out of the Loud Hound of Darkness. She divides her time between Berkeley, California, and France.

From the Back Cover

Here now is an enlarged version of the only handbook of grammar you will ever want to read. With this special edition, Karen Gordon gives the reader more illustrations and even more examples of confusing appositives, the many uses of gerunds, the complicated matter of agreements. The Deluxe Transitive Vampire spins a lively gothic narrative with such characters as the Debutante, famous courtesan, wolf, bat, vampire, mastodon, pizza chef, lummox, lamia, and trilingual solitary. Gordon conjures up this eccentric cast with a uniquely wicked, witty and playful style. Yet every rule is explained with great clarity and precision. While entertaining the reader with the unexpected, she makes the most intricate and impossible usages clear for the first time. "You will not find a more charming or constructive companion than Karen Gordon", Kenneth Auchincloss reported in Newsweek when Ms. Gordon's punctuation book, The Well-Tempered Sentence, first appeared. "How rare it is to laugh as one studies a grammar text", Doris Grumbach exclaimed on National Public Radio. And in the New York Times, Herbert Mitgang warned, "(Karen Gordon's) sentences might make the Edwardian Brothers Fowler blush and, perhaps, Professor Strunk and Mr. White wince". For any reader who finds the rules of grammar irregular and confusing, this book should guide him with confidence through the maze of linguistics.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction
 
It is not often that circumstances force me to utter more than one sentence at a time, or, for that matter, one after another—the usual arrangement of such things. And we are dealing with usual arrangements here: the form and ordering of words, be they mumbled, bellowed, or inscribed. Grammar is a sine qua non of language, placing its demons in the light of sense, sentencing them to the plight of prose. Don’t take an immediate and sullen dislike to this book or look askance before you’ve even begun. Do not mangle it yet. By allowing yourself to be misled by the subject you will end up more intimate with the knowledge that you already possess.
 
This is a dangerous game I’m playing, smuggling the injunctions of grammar into your cognizance through a ménage of revolving lunatics kidnapped into this book. Their stories are digressions toward understanding, a pantomime of raucous intentions in the linguistic labyrinth. By following them through this rough and twisting terrain you will be beguiled into compliance with the rules, however confounding those rules may appear to be. Learning is less a curse than a distraction. If you nuzzle these pages with abandon, writing will lose its terror and your sentences their disarray. I am not trifling with your emotions, nor flapping an antic mirage in your face. Whether you dawdle or maraud your way through these pages, you will return to them repeatedly to find your place and see your face.
 
Before I leave you in the embrace of the transitive vampire, I should introduce him to you, for he too went through the dubious process of education and name out none the worse for wear. He was not always a vampire. He can recall the bittersweet pleasure of a morsel of marzipan dissolving on his tongue and earlier memories of the vanished bliss of his mother’s breast. He was a child of immense generosity and voracious intellect. By the age of ten he had read all of Tolstoy and Pushkin and The Torments of Timofey, a neglected Slavic epic that greatly affected his sensibility and filled his young mind with dread. He knew suffering from the inside out, abjection like the back of his hand, which was slender and silken and thrilling to all who were touched by him.
 
When his manhood set in, our hero set out from home to seek his fortune, or at least his way. The mountains of his mother country were monstrously metaphysical. Words reposed in stones, and it was here, high above the cradle of his childhood, that his nature and purpose revealed themselves, not far from the howling wolves. No one knows quite how it happened, but he came back decidedly changed, transfixed through some secret effect. He had become one of the night’s creatures, with a grammar he had received from the great and jagged unknown. Treading carefully among the broken rules, he returned to set things straight. It was a noble undertaking, and it was noted in his epitaph, although he is immortal, like language itself, and still prowling around.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679418601
• ISBN 13: 9780679418603
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192