Eats, Shoots & leaves: The Zero Tolerance approach to Punctuation By Lynne Truss,
Profile, Rs 195
In good writing, it is the little things that separate the careful writer from an indifferent one. This is a marvellous book about the small things that help punctuate good prose. It has a fund of good humour even though the subject is addressed with a reformer’s zeal. Most people, especially the generation brought up on emails and SMS messages, find punctuation boring. They should read this book, as should those who write well but are not too clear about where to use a comma and where to use a semi colon.
The title of this book demonstrates how important the comma is. It is taken from a story, which runs thus: A panda walks into a café and orders a sandwich. He eats the sandwich and then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. “Why?” asks the utterly perplexed waiter. The panda produces a badly-punctuated wildlife manual, offers it to the waiter and says, “I’m a panda, look it up.” The waiter looks up the relevant entry and reads, Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.
One comma, wrongly placed, can make an enormous difference. Last Sunday, a local paper carried the headline, “Pressure over, cricket tour on”. Imagine the meaning of the sentence if a careless sub had dropped the comma after over.
Lynne Truss is a self-confessed fanatic so far as punctuation is concerned. She is a campaigner who is quite willing to go round with a whitener correcting errors on public signboards. She believes, on the basis of the number of letters she receives, that there are enough committed people to start a movement that will ensure that a panda doesn’t have to shoot. But the zeal can lead to very funny situations. One of her correspondents from Somerset cringed every time he saw the sign in a market garden which said Carrott’s at the top and then listed other vegetables, spelt and punctuated impeccably. The discomfort ceased with the discovery that the proprietor’s name was R. Carrott.
The worst victim of indifferent punctuators is the apostrophe. The misuse of the apostrophe is most manifest when it is absent in “its” when the writer means “it is”. The possessive “its” is confused with the contractive it’s (it is). The simple rule, as Truss says, is to put in the apostrophe when you want to say it is. Proper names ending with s and apostrophes present a more complicated problem. For modern names, the apostrophe is followed by an s, thus Keats’s poems; but in the case of ancient names it isn’t, therefore Achilles’ heel. But the sub-editor’s nightmare doesn’t end there. He has to remember that Lloyd’s of London requires the apostrophe but Lloyds TSB bank does not. Neither does St Andrews or Earls Court. There is no explanation for the absence of a space in HarperCollins.
Truss also takes up for detailed examination the comma, the semi-colon, the dash and the colon. All these are prone to abuse. Yet their proper usage makes for clearer writing, for easier reading and the absence of ambiguity. Truss, in her inimitable way, illustrates this with the following example. Tom locked himself in the shed. England lost to Argentina. The statement conveys nothing, but substitute the full stop after shed with a colon and it says everything.
Modes of punctuation also change. Old timers will recall a time bus was written with an apostrophe before it and when pub was followed by a full stop. To do so now would be risible.
A passage like “I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes” would probably drive Truss up the gum tree. But as a lover of the English language she will be the first to accept that rules are not for the likes of James Joyce. Her book is a guide for us lesser mortals, and a brilliant one at that.