Truss' thrust: Punctuation, period
The title of Lynne Truss' witty and instructive journey through the perilous world of punctuation comes from a joke:
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots into the air.
"Why?" the waiter asks.
The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual. "I'm a panda," he says. "Look it up."
The waiter finds the relevant entry: "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation was a surprise hit in Britain last year and is No. 8 on Paste BN's Best-Selling Books list. Either every self-respecting English teacher is buying multiple copies, or punctuation is not yet a hopeless cause.
Truss writes in the preface of her book that no one "expected the words 'runaway' and 'bestseller' would ever be associated with it, let alone upon the cover of an American edition."
Except for a new preface and a foreword by memoirist Frank McCourt ("If Lynne Truss were Catholic, I'd nominate her for sainthood"), it's a reprint of the British edition. And except for a few cultural references, which went over my American head, that's not a problem. Truss is an entertaining, well-read scold in a culture that could use more scolding.
She is outraged by the proliferation of "public illiteracy." She despairs over a sign advertising "Book's for sale," and she blasts Warner Bros. for the title of its movie Two Weeks Notice.
"Where was the apostrophe?" she asks. "If it were 'one week's notice,' there would be an apostrophe. Therefore 'two weeks' notice' requires an apostrophe!"
Truss notes she has been advised to "get a life." She writes that it's a "matter for despair to see punctuation chucked out as worthless by people who don't know the difference between who's and whose, and whose bloody automatic 'grammar checker' can't tell the difference either."
She offers several analogies to warn about misplaced commas and apostrophes: "If punctuation is the stitching of language, language comes apart, obviously, and all the buttons fall off. If punctuation provides the traffic signals, words bang into each other and everyone ends up in Minehead," which, I assume, is some undesirable destination somewhere in darkest Britain.
Truss goes on at length about the tractable apostrophe, the confusion between the possessive "its" and the contractive "it's" and the use and abuse of commas, colons and semicolons.
All were topics on her popular BBC Radio series about punctuation, Cutting a Dash, which prompts a question for National Public Radio: Whom have you assigned to the punctuation beat?
Truss calls herself a punctuation stickler. Her rallying cry: "Sticklers unite, you have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion, and arguably you didn't have a lot of that to begin with."
She urges everyone to politely but firmly point out errors. I plan to start at my local grocery store, recently renamed Four Season's.
Truss tells a story about a British green-grocer who purposely used poor punctuation on his signs in hopes of attracting complaints from those who would then stay to buy something. I doubt that's the strategy at Four Season's or, for that matter, at Lands End. As Truss asks, shouldn't it be Land's End?