Miss manners? Meet Ms. Manners.

Top of my Xmas gift list (today – yesterday it was Astonishing X-Men 2, which shows how shallow and Joss-obsessed I am) is the new Lynne Truss book. If you’re not already worshipping at the altar of the goddess, let me elaborate on her deity:

First of all, she once gave me a cheque for $8000. Not of her own money, but still. It endears you to a person.

Secondly, she made punctuation cool. I have been, for years, a member of the Apostrophe Preservation Society started by my first girlfriend’s father. I enjoy the use of semi-colons, and spend time evaluating writers on their preference for the m-dash rather than commas. Not dissing, necessarily. Just wondering about their sanity.

Thirdly, she toiled for a long time as an under-appreciated sports columnist and writer of very funny novels before becoming famous and rich by making punctuation cool (and outselling Dan Brown. At the bookstore where I work at least. Where we don’t sell The Da Vinci Code).

Fourthly, the only way in which her punctuation riches have changed her is that she now buys more, and more fabulous, shoes.

Lastly, can you imagine how much she must have been teased about her name at school?

Obviously, you are all now converted to the Church of Truss, and will perform the following rituals religiously (if that’s not too redundant a phrase): circling misused apostrophes on government leaflets, ads on the subway and Xmas cards from people you knew in grade school; having palpitations every time you see someone confusing "that" and "which"; and laughing uproariously at my oft-repeated joke about being "comma-tose" after correcting 90 student papers strewn with punctuation like mines in a Cambodian field.

Yes, the wrath of grading season is upon me again, all swirly and purple like an episcopal robe. Evermore do I identify with Buffy at the end of Season 5, when she wisely (and exhaustedly) comments to Dawn that, "It just keeps coming…" This column is Round 3 avoidance, which means that Round 3 will bleed into the impending Round 4, and by the end of next week I will be unable to assemble a sentence that doesn’t include a grammatical error, a swear word or a reference to a rocket launcher. Grading is like really bad PMS: it makes me that much more sensitive to the appallingness of the world about me. All the little errors build up, weighing me down, making me twitchy.

Although is it really too much to ask that my next-door neighbour not smoke in his (unventilated, wooden) apartment? Or that the nerd from the second floor clean his own body particles out of the dryer lint thing after removing his Star Wars bedsheets? Or that customers not take off their sweaty winter socks right by the front desk where I’m trying to breathe? The list is approaching endless: people chatting on cellphones in the library stacks (or anywhere within a five mile radius of me); anyone who phones me before 9 a.m.; listserv spammers who then spam again to apologise for spamming (unless it’s juicy gossip spam, which is embarrassing and therefore entertaining); video store clerks who believe that their job is to make you feel uncool, moronic and tiny by throwing around obscure directors and movies with each other while you try to choose between the semi-pornographic "European" movies and self-obsessed American "indie" boy movies that make up their stock…

You know when the ironic quotation marks come out that it’s all over. Time for the padded cell, the candy-coloured pills and fingerpainting. Time to admit that the world has pushed you over the edge and handed you an anvil. Free-fall. And the parachute? I’m telling you, it’s the lovely Lynne on manners in her new book Talk to the Hand, which details the thousand petty rudenesses that make up our everyday interactions. The temptation, of course, is to give in to the rising tide. To be as sullen and olfactorially unpleasant as every smokin’, spittin’, sock-removin’, cellphone shriekin’, offensive T-shirt wearin’ streetcar rider from Scarborough to Mississauga. It does look like fun – throw the apostrophes to the wind, what the hell!

But a stubborn old-fashioned streak runs through me, like good dark chocolate through a croissant. That streak is making a stand for courtesy and respect – which are, as every brilliant leading lady and adventure heroine knows, the only way to get away with truly outrageous behaviour.

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