A Personal Tribute

Remarks given at Bill's Memorial by his sister-in-law, Mary Lee Noonan

When I first met Bill in the summer of 1965, he was already at work on The Gregg Reference Manual, often yoked to his typewriter while the rest of us flittered off to the beach. We were slyly warned that we might find our names used in illustrative sentences. We admired his discipline. But we had no idea that he would continue to write successive editions until the end of his life, that in his hands it would become a classic, firmly in place on a sea of desks across the country.

Similarly, I wonder if those who use it have any idea of what GRM can tell them about the man who marshals their words. Certainly those of us who knew and loved Bill recognize his voice with delight. For example, his family knows of Bill's passion for music and particularly his gifts at the piano, so any musical references leap out. But what could Bill's music possibly have to do with rules for the use of words in business prose? Well, here is Bill on the subject of the semicolon and "other myths": "Mastery over the rules of punctuation depends to a considerable extent on cultivating a sensitivity to the way a sentence moves and the way it sounds." He urges his readers, "Develop in yourself a disciplined sense of the relationship between the sound and the structure and the mechanics of language"-in other words, the music. For Bill there was no separation between the words and the music. This fusion is at the heart of The Gregg Reference Manual.

We can also find Bill the gourmet popping out from the pages. By inversion, his standards of culinary excellence gave Bill his definition of an abbreviation. "To put matters in perspective, it may help to think of abbreviations as belonging to the same class of objects as instant coffee and frozen dinners. They don't take up much space and they're great when you're in a hurry, but they never have the taste of the real thing." For Bill, real life was a moveable feast without abbreviations.

A domestic scene enlivens Bill's analysis of how to use a period. "I once posted the following note in my home: 'Will you please close the door.' My children knew that this was not really a polite request but a firm parental command. When they chose to ignore it, I amended the sign to read, 'Will you please close the door!' (I was relying on the exclamation point to carry the full force of my exasperation.) That approach failed too, so I tried a new tack in diplomacy, amending the sign once again: 'Will you please close the door?' My children now knew they had broken my spirit. They now sensed in the sign a pleading note, a petitioning tone, the begging of a favor. They also knew that now I was asking them a real yes-or-no question (or at least I was creating the illusion of asking). Then, in the paradoxical way that children have, once they knew they had the chance to say no, they began to answer my question with tacit affirmation, tugging the door after them on the way out or kicking it shut behind them on the way in." With such a sensitive ear for nuanced words and a wry eye for behavior, Bill could have been a novelist.

And in Bill's discussion of the "comma trauma," I hear a paean, perhaps conscious, perhaps unconscious, to his beloved wife Marie. He is describing "the single inflectional arc that embraces each group of words in one closely knit unit"-with no need for commas. Bill continues, "You can also hear the same continuous arc in the phrase my wife Marie. By all that is logical, the name Marie should be set off by commas because it is not needed to establish which of my wives I'm talking about; unlike an Arabian sheik, I have only one wife.... Although not essential to the meaning, the name Marie is treated as if it were essential because of what style manuals call 'a very close relationship with the preceding words.' Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to state in concrete terms what constitutes 'a very close relationship,' you can tell by the sound when it exists." Bill had perfect pitch.

In closing, I turn to Bill's comments on how consequential or inconsequential the use of a hyphen can be. "What does matter," he says, "is that we express ourselves with precision, verve, and grace." In The Gregg Reference Manual, Bill wrote vividly about style in the use of words. In his life, he created a style of his own that was never without "precision, verve, and grace." It mattered.