Eats, Shoots and Leaves: the zero tolerance approach to punctuation

Lynne Truss, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves: the zero tolerance approach to punctuation” Gotham Books, 2003, 204 pps 

Why the title?  Comma placement matters.  A panda walks into a bar, orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires into the ceiling.  ‘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.

‘I’m a panda,’ he says, at the door.  ‘Look it up.’

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

‘Panda.  Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.’

Every once in a while I read a book and wished the author lived next door so we could have G&Ts and laugh about almost anything, late in the evening.  This is such a book: funny, and instructive at the same time, even if she’s British.  I particularly liked her dedication of the book "to the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution."  It is this kind of humor that placed this book #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

She mentions that if you see a signboard of a shop advertising "CD's, Video's, DVD's, and Book's", and if you see another one declaring "No Dogs Please" and both of them trouble you immensely, then you should read this book.  The author believes it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see how necessary they are--I mean, for instance, just look at what happened to the confused panda.  There is one chapter each on apostrophes and on commas, one on semicolons and colons, one on exclamation marks, question marks, and quotation marks, italic type, dashes, brackets, ellipses, emoticons and one on hyphens.

My Notes:

Pg. 6: The author is quite upset that courteously informing the owner of a store that his sign “Bob,s Pets” (with a comma) should be replaced, is not enough.  Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing?  Could she start one? Where would she get balaclavas? 

Pg. 46:  I mean, full stops (we call them periods) are quite important, aren’t they?  Yet by contrast to the versatile apostrophe, they are stolid little chaps, to say the least.  In fact one might dare to say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and succumbing to burnout from all the thankless effort. 

Pg. 72:  For a millennium and a half, punctuation’s purpose was to guide actors, chanters and readers-aloud through stretches of manuscript, indicating the pauses, accentuating matters of sense and sound, and leaving syntax mostly to look after itself.

Pg. 79:  Between the 16^th century and the present day the comma became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog.  As we shall shortly see, the comma has so many jobs as a ‘separator’ (punctuation marks are traditionally either ‘separators’ or ‘terminators’) that it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organizing words into sensible groups and making them stay put: sorting and dividing, circling and herding; and of course darting off with a peremptory ‘woof’ to round up any wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom.  Commas, if you don’t whistle at them to calm down, are unstoppably enthusiastic at this job.  Luckily the trend in the 20^th century has been towards ever-simpler punctuation.

Pg. 95:  A passage peppered with commas—which in the past would have indicated painstaking and authoritative editorial attention—smacks simply of no backbone. 

Pg. 127:  It should come as no surprise that writers take an interest in punctuation.  I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20^th-century writer were, ‘I should have used fewer semicolons.’

Pg. 163:  Square brackets are most commonly used around the word sic (from the Latin sicut, meaning ‘just as’), to explain the status of an apparent mistake.  Generally, sic means the foregoing mistake (or apparent mistake) was made by the writer/speaker I am quoting; I am but the faithful messenger; in fact I never get anything wrong myself:

She asked for ‘a packet of Starbust [sic].’