Interview with Lynne Truss – answers

1 He had asked her how many it had sold.
2 He said he blanked out when she told him.
3 He means her book had sold in the millions. He is pretending he could not absorb the true figures and facts.
4 Because he is a writer himself, and is pretending he cannot bear the idea that she has sold millions of books when he has not. You can hear that his tone is humorous, and people laugh as he says it.
5 It makes it difficult for her to know exactly how many books have actually been sold that year.
6 He says it is ‘in the tens’ (in the tens = under a hundred).
7 He pretends his own royalty statement of the number of books he has sold is also imprecise, as Lynne Truss has said of her own. Now he says, he knows it is a ‘radical mis-statement of reality’ – ie untrue. The audience sees this as a refusal from him to accept that his own books are not very good and not worth buying.
8 He is exaggerating how few books he has sold – that while Lynne Truss has sold millions of books he has sold only a few dozen. Oxford University Press is a very prestigious publishing house, and his books will certainly have sold in their thousands.
9 As ‘the most famous living author in Britain and John Humphry’s favourite person’. (John Humphry is a TV broadcaster who liked the fact that Lynne Truss thought it important to write English correctly.)
10 No, it is a joke – he is using hyperbole, a deliberate over-statement of the facts. Also, he has no way of knowing who John Humphrey’s ‘favourite person’ is – it is said for its comic effect.
11 That she is a graduate of the English department of University College London.
12 He mentions the fact that she is a writer of a famous best-seller, but that ‘most importantly‘ she graduated from the English department of University College London (which is where he works and also where the students listening are studying). This makes people laugh, he is implying that the students and he are more significant than they actually are.
13 In order, her career has including being a newspaper columnist, a books editor, a writer of scripts for radio, a sports writer and a novelist. The term literary editor is not used but Lynne Truss was a literary editor at The Listener between 1986 and 1990. The Listener was a weekly magazine established by the BBC when it broadcast only on the radio. This indicates Lynne Truss will have written programme and book reviews, and also written magazine articles to inform readers about the background and detail of various books.
14 That even though he had read it before he was still making some mistakes.
15 He asks her what she herself gets wrong.
16 That she 1) did a lot of hard reading, that she 2) discovered what she did not know about punctuation even though she cared about it and that she 3) learned a lot while she was writing the book. Later she mentions that she 4) read many books on punctuation while doing her research for the book.
17 Her sense of freshly acquired knowledge.
18 People laugh when she says this, because normally people assume people who write books know a lot, and she is playing up her ignorance. (to play up = to emphasise) Note

Playing the part of an ignoramus, or an innocent when one in fact knows much more is very typically English and is difficult to assess sometimes, when people from other cultures take statements at face value and don’t realise the truth is often the opposite of what is said.
18 She says she came to sports writing without knowing much about sport.
19 She says when she discovers something that everyone else seems to know and she doesn’t, she over-states what she writes, as a consequence, so sounding as if she is very knowledgeable when she is not.
20 That while preparing her manuscript she sorted out (=understood) the colon and semi-colon for herself for the first time.
21 1) Correcting people’s mistakes and 2) spellings and 3) moving jokes to the end of paragraphs. Of course, the job involves more than this, but she is downplaying it. (ie understating what is involved.)
22 That it is entirely dramatic – concerned with rhythm and tone, so her approach is not grammatical at all. Later she adds she is mostly interested in the musical use of punctuation rather than the grammatical. It is surprising, because it is a little unexpected in a discussion on a book you expect to be about rules and regulations. It is also surprising and amusing to listen to someone having ‘an attitude about the comma‘, as if it is something very, very important. She also says later that her commas are always changed by an editor and this glimpse of disagreements going on behind the scenes is funny, from a person who has written about correct punctuation.
23 That she wanted the book to be readable.
24 1) The author writes a manuscript.2) The copyeditor changes it completely, and applies a house style, changes spellings and so on. 3) Then a proof-reader changes it all back again.
This presents the process as a ridiculous one where one person does something which is immediately changed by someone else, and then changed back, as if no-one knows what anyone else is actually doing.
A house style can mean using a particular font, or current uses of English which may be grammatically incorrect, or cutting paragraphs down so that they are much shorter than originally.
25 He says "That’s a nightmare one!" in a very exaggerated way that the audience knows is an inappropriate reaction. It gives an image of the man fighting over something basically trivial as if it were a matter of life and death. He is playing the part of a person who has an obsession with something, and this amuses listeners.

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