Who You Calling Savage?

Hilarious rant by anthropologist Roger Sandall over Lynn Truss' Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life. I have to confess I haven't read TTTH, not least because I didn't enjoy her hectoring Eats Shoots and Leaves. Geeze, if you're going to write a book about the failure of everybody to observe proper grammar, wouldn't you want it to be copyedited to a fair thee well? Ms. Truss didn't proof her proofer—and all I could think as she wagged her finger was that she should have washed it first.

So what got Sandall's dander up? Was it the utter bloody rudeness of accusing everybody of being utterly bloodily rude? (BTW, my mother would have been appalled at the shocking rudeness of that subtitle.) No, it was Truss' depiction of people without manners as "savages."

"Surprising though it may seem," Sandall retorts, "it can reasonably be argued that in nine out of ten of the archaic societies recorded by anthropologists there was less screeching and more politeness, less boorishness and more decency and dignity, than you’ll find in some western societies today. And as Lewis Mumford suggested fifty years ago in The Transformations of Man—a book and writer we shall be returning to—due respect should be paid to the courtesies of an older world we have irretrievably lost."

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