Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Lynne Truss
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 Gotham Books
ISBN: 1592400876

The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.

Michaela Roessner of The Stars Compel fame mentioned this title in an email when we were having a giggle about some grammar up in which we'd gotten tangled. See, I'm a good little writer -- I make sure I don't end my sentences with a preposition! It's (the placement of the apostrophe in this little word is the main bone of contention in this fast reading book) taken about 6 months for this “Runaway #1 British Bestseller” to float across The Pond to Gotham City & then overland to me.

Yes, Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a hilarious, learned diatribe about punctuation: how it changes the most innocuous into the ambiguous; the ordinary into the infuriating. Here is a witty woman with a thing about the “moral decay of punctuation” -- all those promiscuous apostrophes & cute commas, sensitive semi-colons, elusive ellipses, & fulsome fullstops (or positive periods, depending on which side of The Pond you're wading) which we sprinkle upon our texts with the wary hopefulness of a person choosing lottery numbers.

The most pervasive culprit for making mad grammatical mistakes is our attempt at brevity. Trying to say in three words what needs to be said in five, we add our commas & apostrophes all over the place regardless of plurals, contractions or possessiveness ... sometimes even carving 'em in stone!

That punctuation differs somewhat in the UK & the USA, as does spelling, is addressed in Lynne Truss' Introduction (there is also a riff about whether this author should possess her Introduction as Truss's or Truss': my eccentricity & my editorial power permits me to choose. So there!). However, if you didn't know it, both Yanks & Brits are appalling punctuationalists, & getting worse ... or badder, if you really want to shiver the timbers of we few, we very few sticklers, a decade or more of grammatical saturation, notwithstanding. I was alarmed to note from Ms. Truss' research that British school students of the last 30 years have not been subjected to the strenuous inculcation dodderers like me were -- something to do with political correctness & the Board of Education worrying about inhibiting the little darlings' efforts at self-expression.

The joke in the title is explained on the back cover, & I'll leave it there so you'll just have to pick up the book to read it. It says it all: how the misuse of “one of them floating comma things” can wreak havoc on our sense of perspective, time, possession, literacy, if not a matter of life & death. Some of the mistakes have to be seen to be believed! However, punctuation is quite a modern affectation. For a very long time during the eons when we wrote in Latin (& the only thing we wrote about was G-d) we did not even use periods or paragraphs or capital letters imagine that everything simply ran along from idea to idea with no indication of where to take a breath where one thought ended & another began ... sometimesnotevenputtingspacesbetweenwords

Frank McCourt's Preface is charming. Gadzooks folks, when you write something for someone who has written about the misuse of punctuation, you've got to get it right. He has striven to do so, complete with parenthetical (in the UK you can't say “bracket”-thetical) flutters of doubt!

Eats, Shoots & Leaves is lovely stuff! Please do take it seriously, as in seriously good fun, seriously good information & seriously, folks, let's see if we can't get a grip on our apostrophes & still keep our sense of humor before we're all apoplectic.

If you love the English language, read this book.
If you're perplexed by the apostrophe, ditto.
If you're in a coma about commas, ditto.
If you want some fine, comedic history about all those squiggles, where they came from & their current usage, then Lynne Truss has a treat for you!

Thanks, Michaela, I needed this! Eats, Shoots & Leaves is funny & informative. Lynne Truss has a raft of examples from shopkeepers, ads, newspaper headlines, even pamphlets from institutions which should know better, all wrapt up in a delightful instruction into punctuation history, which she proffers in hopes of arousing the curious reader into becoming more careful about how to flavor our language with these meaningful motes!

Many a true word written in jest, & very well done!

Lynne Truss is a writer & journalist who started out as a literary editor with a blue pencil & then got sidetracked. The author of three novels (none of which is available in the USA) & numerous radio comedy dramas, she spent six years as the television critic of The Times (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. She now reviews books for The Sunday Times & is a familiar voice on BBC Radio 4. She lives in Brighton, England.
(06/13/04)

Rebecca