Punctuation does matter, book asserts

In the curious world of publishing, where a best seller can be forged from little more than the ruminations of a vacuous TV starlet, Lynne Truss’ hit book may be one of the unlikeliest success stories of the last year.

It’s not about the newest dieting fad, politics, sports, sex, pop culture trend or any other form of national obsession. It’s a book about punctuation, of all things, and one stalwart woman’s fight to guard the English language from the ungrammatical barbarians at the gate who would corrupt it.

And most surprising of all is that “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” is an immensely popular read that has occupied a spot on The New York Times best-seller list for 37 weeks. More than 800,000 copies of the book have so far been sold in Britain, where the author and journalist has her own witty BBC Radio talk show about punctuation, and there are more than a million copies in print in the United States.

USA Today recently named “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” its book of 2004, an intriguing choice when you consider how much space that newspaper devotes to such weighty matters as the ruminations of vacuous TV starlets.

Having just procured my own copy, I would urge you not to be scared off by the hard-edged tone of its “Zero Tolerance” subtitle. Truss writes in a lively, enthusiastic, urbane and often humorous style about a passion for the proper uses of punctuation that anyone who loves and respects language might share. Punctuation really does matter, she believes, no matter how much the sloppily written language on advertising signs, in e-mails and all over the Internet conspires against its critical mission.

Truss’ title derives from an instructive joke about a panda bear that walks into a cafe, orders and eats a sandwich, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

“Why?” asks the confused waiter as the panda makes toward 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, thanks to one misplaced comma, finds an explanation for the bear’s unnatural behavior.

“Panda. Large black-and-white, bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

Truss admits it’s difficult being a stickler for punctuation these days, when irritating violations abound throughout the English-speaking world.

“Everywhere one looks, there are signs of ignorance and indifference,” she says, speaking for all of us who cringe at the lazily misplaced comma, the overdone dash, the abused apostrophe.

At a gas station near her home, for instance, she saw a sign that beckoned her to “Come inside for CD’s, Video’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s.” A sign at a local health club announced, “I’ts party time, on Saturday 24th May we are have a disco/party night for free, it will be a ticket only evening.”

She begs us to remain wary of signs advertising “banana’s and potatoe’s on sale,” lest our eyes grow so accustomed to such errors that they one day fail to recognize them. Be on guard, she writes, for headlines informing us that “Dead Sons Photos May be Released,” when only one son is involved, and for competitions in which “The judges decision is final.”

She reminds us, too, how a simple colon, when combined with a comma, can radically alter the very meaning of a sentence and possibly spark bad feelings between the sexes in the process: “A woman without her man is nothing” becomes, with a devilish punctuational tweak, “A woman: without her, man is nothing.”

“The reason it’s worth standing up for punctuation,” Truss writes, “is not that it’s an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning. Punctuation herds words together, keeps others apart. Punctuation directs you how to read, in the way musical notation directs a musician how to play.”

Truss insists that “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” is not a book about grammar, that she is not a grammarian and that a degree in English is not a prerequisite for caring that a comma needs to be replaced by a semicolon.

“So if this book doesn’t instruct about punctuation, what does it do?” she writes. “Well, you know those self-help books that give you permission to love yourself? This one gives you permission to love punctuation.”

So sticklers of the world unite! The language you help to save may well be your own.