Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Keira Soleore
February 14, 2011
"A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. ´Why?´ asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. […] The waiter turn to the relevant entry. […] P a n d a. Large black-n-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves." This was a story recounted in the hallowed assemblies of England´s House of Lords—and it was taken from the back cover of Lynne Truss´s book Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Who would have thought a book on punctuation could cause such a sensation?
Certainly not its modest, if indignant and fussbudgety, author, who began her surprise hit motivated by horror and despair at being assaulted daily by the current abysmal state—"approaching illiteracy"—of punctuation standards. She targeted this book for the tiny minority of British people "who love punctuation and don´t like to see it mucked about with," and she pulled out all stops to make her points. (Subtly, tact, fairness—eh, what of it?) Her mission to "engage in some direct-action argy-bargy" on behalf of the much-maligned road signs placed on the highway of communication has helped the book´s spectacular rise up the bestseller lists.
With hilarious examples, such as "children drive slowly" and "extra marital sex," she weaves her way through apostrophes, commas, semicolons, hyphens, dashes, and other lesser known punctuation marks. Each punctuation mark is introduced with anecdotes, examples of correct and incorrect usages, paragraphs of Truss venting her spleen with side-splitting results, and an enumerated list of the rules of usage with samples.
Truss peppers her scrappy prose with historical citations, even going back all the way to Aristophanes to identify the comma as a signal for actors´ phrasing. She considers punctuation as self-evidently useful in preventing enormous mix-ups and as a courtesy designed to help readers understand a story without stumbling. As another diehard fan of punctuation Pico Iyer punctiliously put it in his essay In Praise of the Humble Comma, "The gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the same could be said—could it not?—of the humble comma."
Even as she laments the current state of indifference towards correct usage, she dreads where we will end up with the trend towards simply typing—as opposed to writing—e-mail messages without a pause—just sending fragments—strung together—like this.
Despite professed, if pugnacious, admiration for "striking Bolshevik printers in St. Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters," Ms. Truss makes correct punctuation usage so cool, you have to admire her for it (and secretly re-read everything you´ve written and re-examine every pesky squiggle).
Certainly not its modest, if indignant and fussbudgety, author, who began her surprise hit motivated by horror and despair at being assaulted daily by the current abysmal state—"approaching illiteracy"—of punctuation standards. She targeted this book for the tiny minority of British people "who love punctuation and don´t like to see it mucked about with," and she pulled out all stops to make her points. (Subtly, tact, fairness—eh, what of it?) Her mission to "engage in some direct-action argy-bargy" on behalf of the much-maligned road signs placed on the highway of communication has helped the book´s spectacular rise up the bestseller lists.
With hilarious examples, such as "children drive slowly" and "extra marital sex," she weaves her way through apostrophes, commas, semicolons, hyphens, dashes, and other lesser known punctuation marks. Each punctuation mark is introduced with anecdotes, examples of correct and incorrect usages, paragraphs of Truss venting her spleen with side-splitting results, and an enumerated list of the rules of usage with samples.
Truss peppers her scrappy prose with historical citations, even going back all the way to Aristophanes to identify the comma as a signal for actors´ phrasing. She considers punctuation as self-evidently useful in preventing enormous mix-ups and as a courtesy designed to help readers understand a story without stumbling. As another diehard fan of punctuation Pico Iyer punctiliously put it in his essay In Praise of the Humble Comma, "The gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the same could be said—could it not?—of the humble comma."
Even as she laments the current state of indifference towards correct usage, she dreads where we will end up with the trend towards simply typing—as opposed to writing—e-mail messages without a pause—just sending fragments—strung together—like this.
Despite professed, if pugnacious, admiration for "striking Bolshevik printers in St. Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters," Ms. Truss makes correct punctuation usage so cool, you have to admire her for it (and secretly re-read everything you´ve written and re-examine every pesky squiggle).
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