My Cats.

Penelope.


Penelope, crouched.


Penelope, asleep.


Odysseus.


Odysseus, hiding.


Odysseus, found.


Odysseus, hello.

Lynne Truss. Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss



Finished 9/3/08



Lynne Truss’ book takes its title from an old joke, which is conveniently reprinted on the dust jacket:


"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 toward 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.'"



The joke aptly summarizes Truss’ comedic tone, and her dead-serious approach to punctuation, which she reveals, again from the dust jacket, in this quote: “So, punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.”



I’m a stickler for punctuation, at least for myself. From a sense of pride and ascetic pleasure, I craft correspondence, emails, and even text messages while strictly adhering to rules of punctuation and spelling. Editing, at times, is a sense of pleasure for me. I will not go so far to say that a misspelled, improperly punctuated email or text message is insulting to the reader; however, one can’t help but wonder, if the writer put so little thought into their writing, what about other aspects of their lives? For one so in love with written language, it is a difficult, narrow path remaining tolerant. As a rule, I abstain from being judgmental based on a person’s lack of punctuation skills. Truss, however, does not.



The vandalistic anecdotes and random assortment of historical trivia are the life of Truss’ book of the “zero tolerance approach to punctuation.” She notes times of defacing public property to add and remove apostrophes and hyphens. Her justification, which she details through historic examples and writers’ diatribes, is that without punctuation, that humble guide that instructs how to read the written word, language would breakdown to chaos and ambiguity. And she’s right, as one can see in the example above. A misplaced comma renders an entirely new meaning to the sentence.



Yet, one cannot fill a book on this premise alone, no matter how many pages she has of anecdotes. Thus, she recites basic rules for different punctuation and why it is worth saving. Sadly, it is here that book breaks down and becomes uninteresting. I admire her attempts at keeping things interesting. Many of the examples are bizarre sentences, either by her hand or borrowed. For those not as familiar with the rules of grammar, this would be a good addition. For others, there are more formidable guides, which, in all likelihood, are already owned by them.



If this book left me with anything, it was an intense desire to read more George Bernard Shaw. The man’s theories are just fascinating.




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