On Litopia After Dark this week The Boston Globe reports that the semicolon is in trouble.

And, dare we say punctuation in general.  Is this the end of civilisation as we know it – or simply the end of dead-end pedantry? And Biographies – an endangered species?  Both the quality and quantity of biographies is falling, says the Guardian.  What do we read into this?  Also, the dumbing down of society.  Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30 says the author of newly-published “The Dumbest Generation” – they’re stupid!  Can this really be true? According to a recent UNICEF survey, Britain is the worst country in the Western world in which to be a child. Theodore Dalrymple says it our “nonjudgmentalism”.  But is his judgement the same as ours?

On the panel this week are Donna Ballman, Dave Bartram and Paul Baker.  The chatroom on Ustream at 8pm (GMT) was erudite as ever, and they contributed magnificently to the show.  Join us next week and give us your opinion.

Links mentioned in the show…

In the Boston Globe, Jan Freeman….

IN A RECENT column inviting readers to copy-edit along with him, language maven James Kilpatrick objected to a possessive that appeared in the Washington Post: “Stephens’s story.”

“I would argue in favor of an unencumbered apostrophe, i.e., Stephens’ story,” wrote Kilpatrick.

Argument, however, is beside the point; either version is correct.

Kilpatrick, an old newspaperman, likes AP style, which forms possessives of words ending in -s by adding just the apostrophe. The Post, and many other publications, think the apostrophe-s version is more natural and elegant. Last year, the legislators of Arkansas joined this faction, voting to make their state’s official possessive Arkansas’s.

But Kilpatrick’s return to the apostrophe hobbyhorse made me realize how nearly dead that horse is now. Apostrophe mistakes are surely as common as ever, but readers no longer complain about them much. Could this be an unintended effect of Lynne Truss’s 2004 bestseller, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves”?

Truss’s subtitle, after all, promised “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” And though she conceded that was an impossible dream – no golden age of consistent punctuation had ever existed – she did manage to say just about all one could say about apostrophe abuse, whether on the greengrocer’s sign (carrot’s, eggplant’s) or in possessives (it’s, her’s).

Link to the University of Sussex page on the colon.

In the Guardian, Kathryn Hughes…

Thus Katie Price has managed to shift 335,649 hardback copies of her life story Being Jordan, despite her jaunty admission that someone else wrote it. Meanwhile, Hilary Spurling’s Costa-winning Matisse the Master, surely one of the best biographies of the decade, has lifetime hardback sales of just 12,451.

However, it is when you look at the quality of work produced rather than the number of books sold that you start to fear for the health of a genre that not only predates the novel by centuries (think of Plutarch’s Lives), but holds peculiarly British credentials. Since becoming a biographer 15 years ago – most recently of Mrs Beeton and George Eliot – I have read widely within the genre and with professional attention. I also teach on the MA in life writing at UEA, which aims to give would-be biographers a solid grounding in their chosen art. And I get hundreds of titles sent to me every year for review. I have to say I am struck by their recent falling-off.

Lee Drutman in The Los Angeles Times…

In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!

Such is the kind of recklessly distracted impatience that makes Mark Bauerlein fear for his country. “As of 2008,” the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in “The Dumbest Generation,” “the intellectual future of the United States looks dim.”

The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America’s youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of “enduring ideas and conflicts.” Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America’s youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a “brazen disregard of books and reading.”

In City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple…

Britain is the worst country in the Western world in which to be a child, according to a recent UNICEF report. Ordinarily, I would not set much store by such a report; but in this case, I think it must be right-not because I know so much about childhood in all the other 20 countries examined but because the childhood that many British parents give to their offspring is so awful that it is hard to conceive of worse, at least on a mass scale. The two poles of contemporary British child rearing are neglect and overindulgence.

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