The Sandspur

Issue date: 4/22/05 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Media Credit: COURTESY OF AMAZON.COM

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots.

"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. "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 above joke provides the reference point for the title Eats, Shoots & Leaves. It is the best of all the book's Ive read this year, it's author does a wonderful job of conveying her message.

Let me digress: if you found no urge to cringe at my gross misuse of punctuation in the above sentence (which should actually be two sentences), or if you didn't get the joke, then stop reading this review. Eats, Shoots & Leaves will not appeal to your indifference. However, if you're considering use of a red pen to correct the former mistakes, you might feel inclined to read on.

In the surprise bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, British literary humorist Lynne Truss expresses her frustration with the multitude of punctuation infractions that pervade English-speaking society. The book's introductory chapter discusses people with "the Seventh Sense," a feeling of shock and hostility upon observing crimes of punctuation. Truss then vents her aggravation in six aptly written chapters; each section is devoted to a particular punctuation mark and its proper and improper uses. The book successfully conveys Truss's self-deprecating sense of being a stickler for accurately placed punctuation marks.

In "The Tractable Apostrophe," Truss discusses her annoyance "the greengrocer's apostrophe," the phenomenon of an ill-placed apostrophe in a plural form (so named for its common occurrence in British fruit vendors' signs). Truss also contrastingly discusses the omission of apostrophes, and she wittily maintains a continuous running joke that chastises an American motion picture distributor for its release of a film called Two Weeks Notice (because "weeks" is a plural possessive and needs an apostrophe after the s-but you knew that already).

In "That'll Do, Comma," the author reveals an ultimate rule: "Don't use commas like a stupid person." She goes on to express how use of the comma requires intelligence and discretion-in other words, she doesn't believe in throwing them around. In "A Little Used Punctuation Mark," Truss reveals the constant dispute between English and American grammarians on the use of hyphens (apparently, the Brits think we grossly overuse them).

The other chapters in Eats, Shoots & Leaves provides equally interesting commentaries. The book is intelligently refreshing-Lynne Truss offers a welcome change from the stringent handbooks on punctuation placement I've encountered over the years. Interestingly, many critics have noted that the U.S edition itself is not punctuated to American English standards, as the British prefer to be more sparing with their punctuation usage (for example, the title itself could warrant another comma after "shoots"). Don't let the nitpicking hinder you, though-Eats, Shoots & Leaves is an engaging read for current and future punctuation pundits.

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