Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Foreword

If Lynne Truss were Catholic I’d nominate her for sainthood. As it is, thousands of English teachers from Maine to Maui will be calling down blessings on her merry, learned head for the gift of her book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

It’s a book about punctuation. Punctuation, if you don’t mind! (I hesitated over that exclamation mark, and it’s all her doing.) The book is so spirited, so scholarly, those English teachers will sweep all other topics aside to get to, you guessed it, punctuation. Parents and children will gather by the fire many an evening to read passages on the history of the semi-colon and the terrible things being done to the apostrophe. Once the poor stepchild of grammar (is that comma OK here?), punctuation will emerge as the Cinderella of the English language.

There are heroes and villains in this book. Oh, you never thought such could be possible? You never thought a book on punctuation could contain raw sex? Well, here is Lynne Truss bemoaning the sad fact she never volunteered to have the babies of Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450–1515). (Help! In that last sentence does the period go inside the parenthesis/bracket or outside?) If you actually know who Aldus was you get the door prize and, perhaps, Ms. Truss will have your babies.

Aldus Manutius the Elder invented the italic type-face and printed the first semicolon. His son, yes, Aldus the Younger, declared in 1566, “that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax.”

“Ho hum,” you say or, if you’re American, “Big deal.” Very well. You’re entitled to your ignorance, but pause a moment, dear reader, and imagine this page of deathless prose, the one you’re reading, without punctuation.

In the villain department I think greengrocers get a bad rap. No, this doesn’t come from Ms. Truss. She merely notes their tendency to stick in apostrophes where apostrophes had never gone before. I feel no such sympathy for the manager of my local supermarket who must have a cellarful of apostrophes he doesn’t know what to do with: “Egg’s, $1.29 a doz.,” for heaven’s sake! (In the U.S. it’s “heaven’s sakes.”)

Egg’s, and it’s not even a possessive.

Lynne Truss has a great soul and I wouldn’t mind drinking tea out of a saucer with her—when you read the book you’ll see what I mean—except that, on occasion, she lets her Inner Stickler get out of hand. She tells us of “a shopkeeper in Bristol who deliberately stuck ungrammatical signs in his window as a ruse to draw people into the shop; they would come to complain, and he would then talk them into buying something.” Then she flings down the gauntlet: “. . . he would be ill-advised to repeat this ploy once my punctuation vigilantes are on the loose.” (Notice my masterly use of the ellipsis. Hold your admiration. I owe it all to Lynne.)

I would have that Bristol shopkeeper knighted. Imagine the conversations in his shop. Irate customers skewering him on points of grammar. You could write a play, a movie on this shopkeeper. Track him down, Lynne. Bring him to London. Present him at court.

On second thought, present Lynne Truss at court. The Queen needs cheering up, and what better way than to wax sexy with Ms. Truss over Aldus Manutius, the Elder and the Younger, their italics, their proto-semicolon.

O, to be an English teacher in the Age of Truss.

—Frank McCourt

January 2004