A panda walks into a cafe. 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 towards 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."
That's the story that inspires the title to Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. This charming book tackles the growing problem of improper punctuation, which seems to be getting out of control. With the advent of email, text messaging, and even blogging, punctuation and grammar have lost their formality and attendant clarity. An informal, conversational tone is fine in many cases, but what's up with the superfluous apostrophe, especially in the possessive its? We see such errors way too often: "Luxury at it's finest." Ugh. More superfluous apostrophes: "The lawyer's all had Blackberrie's." (That last word is tricky: of course the apostrophe does not belong, and the product is called a BlackBerry -- plural, BlackBerrys.)
Author Lynne Truss delivers her defense of punctuation with British dry humor throughout this 204 page book. Apostrophe abuse is not the only target: commas, dashes, colons, semicolons, and more (although the Pipe is never mentioned) are discussed in snobby-but-funny prose. She's like a proper British schoolmarm whose class you'd love to take even though you might fail it.
A nice addition to the first pressing of the book is the "Punctuation Repair Kit" consisting of several stickers to cover up (or add) an apostrophe to offending signs. If you're a punctuation stickler like me, you'll understand the catharsis in correcting those annoying signs like "Banana's for sale" or "The Smith's."
Sticklers, unite!
