Stats
- Paperback
- 209 pages
- Published April 2006 by The Penguin Group (first published January 2nd, 2003)
- Original Title Eats, Shoots and Leaves
- ISBN1592402038 (ISBN13: 9781592402038)
- Edition Language English
About
From the publisher, ” 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.
“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.”
So, punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.
Now, we all know the basics of punctuation. Or do we? A look at most neighborhood signage tells a different story. Through sloppy usage and low standards on the internet, in e-mail, and now text messages, we have made proper punctuation an endangered species.
In Eats, Shoots & Leaves, former editor Truss dares to say, in her delightfully urbane, witty, and very English way, that it is time to look at our commas and semicolons and see them as the wonderful and necessary things they are. This is a book for people who love punctuation and get upset when it is mishandled. From the invention of the question mark in the time of Charlemagne to George Orwell shunning the semicolon, this lively history makes a powerful case for the preservation of a system of printing conventions that is much too subtle to be mucked about with. “
Thoughts
“The rule is: don’tuse commas
like a stupid person.
I mean it.”
Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
Well, I’m home. I have to say that this hospital stay was definitely more pleasant than my last. Tina snuck me in a pastrami sandwich, and that made all the difference. To be honest, I think she was feeling guilty about the whole Harry Potter debacle. I reassured her that it was mostly not her fault, and I think she felt better. And I “borrowed” this book from the hospital library (actually just a cart, but that’s what they call it) on my way out, so at least I’ll have something tangible to show for my ridiculously overinflated hospital bill. When Truss is done with her grammatical vigilantism, maybe we can set her loose on the health care system. Oh, and I also made off with a pair of those hospital pants they give you – perfect for lounging around the house with a book. Just put my trousers on right over them and walked out like I was in Shawshank Redemption. See ya suckers!
In any case, I appreciate someone who can get worked up in righteous anger over things most people think are silly (no, not you, Trump), and so I must admit to having a little punctuation crush on Ms. Truss. And of course, I imagine her rantings with a great British accent as well, because only a British person could write this book. There simply aren’t people in America who care enough about English to do it! If we are a melting pot of culture, we are a Vitamix of language. We just dump it all in and destroy it! We make up words like hangry, bromance, and chillax. We have literally destroyed the word ‘literally.’ And America is the land where grammar goes to die. It doesn’t help that everyone has a cell phone, and “talking” now means texting, which people have no patience for, so all text conversations look like a bomb went off in an alphabet soup factory. But even when we are speaking, we have pretty much given up. No, Gerry, you don’t shop at Kroger’s. The store is called Kroger. There’s no one in there named Kroger, and it is not his store. If you must know, Kroger is owned mostly by Cerebus Capital Management, who happen to bankroll a bunch of jackass politicians, but I understand that you need your discount cottage cheese, so no judgment.
Meanwhile, it felt wholly satisfying to find someone as ready as I am to get pissed off about commas. Walking around these days is subjecting yourself to an assault of syntax no matter where you go. The examples are myriad, but I will summarize the inanity of the status quo with a sign I saw on a bathroom that read, “For disabled elderly pregnant children only.” And as much as I was moved with sympathy for the poor kids who also happen to be disabled, old, and with child, I was even more sad for the irretrievable state of affairs of our language that made them that way.
But maybe, just maybe, if everyone reads this book, we can salvage something. But I doubt it.
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About The Author
Lynne Truss is a writer and journalist who started out as a literary editor with a blue pencil and then got sidetracked. The author of three novels and numerous radio comedy dramas, she spent six years as the television critic of The Times of London, followed by four (rather peculiar) years as a sports columnist for the same newspaper. She won Columnist of the Year for her work for Women’s Journal. Lynne Truss also hosted Cutting a Dash, a popular BBC Radio 4 series about punctuation. She now reviews books for the Sunday Times of London and is a familiar voice on BBC Radio 4. She lives in Brighton, England
