Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance
Approach to Punctuation
by Lynne Truss
(Gotham Books, 240 pages, $17.50)
I am not ashamed to admit it — I’m a grammar nazi. I cringe at
misplaced commas. I wail when I receive e-mails without a single
capital letter. I snort at signs advertising “banana’s for sale.”
Just this minute, I’m enraged by Fox News Channel’s ignorance of
the difference between “its” and “it’s.”
British critic and novelist Lynne Truss wrote Eats, Shoots
& Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation for
people like me. “[Y]ou know those self-help books that give you
permission to love yourself?” she asks. “This one gives you
permission to love punctuation.” “Sticklers unite!” is her rallying
cry.
So it’s rather surprising, then, and probably to no one more
than the author herself, that Eats, Shoots & Leaves
climbed to No. 1 bestseller in America, even though Truss employs
British spellings, usage, and examples throughout. The secret of
her success is that she’s written a book on a topic most consider
dull and made it fresh, fun, and witty.
ES&L is part history (did you know the exclamation
point was originally known as “the note of admiration”?), part
instruction (the chapter on the hyphen, an excellent example of
telling by showing, is a particular joy), and even part confession
(she once banished a poorly-read American pen pal with a plethora
of semicolons). But mostly it’s a celebration of those beautiful
symbols: the comma, the hyphen, the exclamation point, the dash,
and, oh yes, the semicolon.
And there are jokes. This is not as cringe-worthy as it sounds.
Except, perhaps, the joke in the title — about a panda turned
violent by the mistaken addition of a rather important comma.
Truss’s enthusiasm does now and then get the better of her. She
seems obsessed with the grammatically incorrect movie title:
Two Weeks Notice, for example. Hollywood is a notorious
punctuation scofflaw — witness also the missing question mark in
Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
But how pleasant it was to spend a few hours musing on the
subtleties of the English language. And how pleasant to know
thousands of Americans are doing so as well — hours they might
have wasted reading the usual wisdom-for-dummies tripe that litters
bookstores.
It is easy enough to understand why fewer people normally would
prefer to wrestle with the intricacies of punctuation than the
intricacies of The Da Vinci Code. Many are frightened by
punctuation or confused by it. And the subject generates quarrels
faster than anything except religion (and The Da Vinci
Code). As Truss says, “There are people who embrace the Oxford
[i.e., “serial”] comma and people who don’t, and I’ll just say
this: never get between these people when drink has been
taken.”
ES&L occasionally made me feel like a drunken
pedant. Truss declares, for example, that words ending in “s” must
use an apostrophe followed by another “s.” But this is not the only
way — or so it seems to me. I prefer to use just the apostrophe,
and this is perfectly acceptable usage. Grammar is sometimes a
matter of taste.
But then sometimes it isn’t, and much can ride on a mere comma.
There is the story of Sir Roger Casement, the Irish nationalist
“hanged on a comma,” it was said, in 1916. He was charged under the
Treason Act of 1351, which was written in Norman French and
completely unpunctuated — making interpretation rather
ambiguous.
Less grave, but no less closely argued, is the case of Graham
Greene’s Comma. On his deathbed, the novelist inserted one in a
statement giving his authorized biographer, Norman Sherry, access
to his papers at Georgetown University. Does this comma restrict
access solely to Sherry? Georgetown’s librarian thinks so, but
Greene’s own son does not.
So take that, young text messengers, with your punctuation-free
prose. Truss argues that the Internet Age has made language
education more important than ever, now that practically everyone
is a writer of some sort: a blogger, a reviewer at Amazon.com, or
just an e-mail correspondent. Now that “People who have been taught
nothing about their own language are (contrary to educational
expectations) spending all their leisure hours attempting to string
sentences together for the edification of others.”
As Truss explains in the introduction, punctuation is analogous
to good manners. She notes that “punctuation” has the same root as
“punctilious,” which means “attentive to formality or
etiquette.”
It is no surprise why so few modern Americans know how to use a
comma. It is for the same reason that they ignore RSVPs,
immediately call their friends’ parents by their first names, and
don’t bother to send thank-you notes. These are not mere
trivialities. As Emily Post wrote in her 1922 book, Etiquette
in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, “manner is
personality — the outward manifestation of one’s innate character
and attitude toward life.”
