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Someone at my job handed around copies of an article about Eats, Shoots and Leaves . The article includes the rhetorical question "How can you resist a book dedicated to 'the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution'?"
Well, it's a good thing the author claims to be a punctuation expert, not a copyeditor or historian, because I answered that one immediately: there were no Bolsheviks in 1905. That factional split (and wonderful example of propagandistic naming, right up there with "Moral Majority") hadn't yet happened. Socialist printers, sure. Communists, quite possibly. Not Bolsheviks.
And this on a book that's supposedly about the value of accuracy and precision.
[Crossposted to an open thread on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tnh's Making Light, far enough down that I don't know if anyone will notice it.]
Well, it's a good thing the author claims to be a punctuation expert, not a copyeditor or historian, because I answered that one immediately: there were no Bolsheviks in 1905. That factional split (and wonderful example of propagandistic naming, right up there with "Moral Majority") hadn't yet happened. Socialist printers, sure. Communists, quite possibly. Not Bolsheviks.
And this on a book that's supposedly about the value of accuracy and precision.
[Crossposted to an open thread on
tnh's Making Light, far enough down that I don't know if anyone will notice it.]