From Publishers Weekly
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From Booklist
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Review
Marshall Pugh, The Chancer
Apostrophe, comma, colon, semicolon, question, quotation and exclamation marks, italics, dashes, brackets, ellipsis, hyphens and solidus are all tackled with gusto by Lynne Truss in this showpiece of a book. And in order to sex-up a subject, which at its most basic level is about different kinds of interruption, Truss quotes from Thomas McCormack’s book The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist (1989), arguing that punctuation should “tango the reader into the pauses, inflections, continuities and connections that the spoken line would convey.” This comparison with Latin dance would like to be very suggestive. It is as if Truss wants to promote punctuation as having deep tribal rhythms and ecstasies, when, in actuality, putting marks upon a page is really about being “a stickler” and about the preservation of “standards”.
To be punctilious about punctuation might be redescribed, by a Freudian, as a form of sublimation. Truss confesses, “while other girls were out with boyfriends on Sunday afternoons, getting their necks disfigured by love bites, I was at home with the wireless listening to an Ian Messiter quiz called Many a Slip, in which erudite and amusing contestants spotted grammatical errors in pieces of prose. It was a fantastic programme.” If to be fascinated with punctuation is about not being sexual, then punctuation is, in itself, an insistent signal that sabotages the sensual. James Joyce knew this. And so Molly Bloom’s final monologue in Ulysses has no punctuation marks at all.
If punctuation must be compared to dance, it is certainly not doing the tango. But it might be likened to the starched and mannequin-like performances of the strictest ballroom. The feigned mannerisms of ballroom dancing seem, to me, to be closer to Truss’s favourite definition for the function of punctuation-“a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling.” For her, the analogy with good manners is “perfect,” and she goes on to argue, with an after dinner etiquette, that punctuation marks are like “truly good manners”; they are “invisible”; “they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves.” And her comparison of questions or quote marks with good manners, for example, gives some indication that the ideal reader of this book would prefer Jane Austen and the delicate ceremony of afternoon tea to the seduction of Latin rhythms.
Truss’s exorbitant expressions of discontent about poor punctuation-‘it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement’; ‘part of one’s despair’; ‘It hurts, though. It hurts like hell’-not only disclose that she is a terrible idealist in search of a punctuation Utopia, but that her punctuation fetish seems to be a covert way of talking about what it means to be English and of discussing England’s history, politics and its relationship with the United States. For Truss’s examples of punctuation use and maltreatment suggest that beneath her story about “the tractable apostrophe” or the classical colon, for instance, rage those old debates that are partly about national identity-which interrupt her tale as interesting as they are.
Reflecting on England’s religious history, Truss argues that “huge doctrinal differences” hung on the placing of a comma. For example, “Verily, I say unto thee, This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise” could also be “Verily I say unto thee this day, Thou shalt be with me in Paradise.” The first is the Protestant version of Luke, xxiii, which “lightly skips over the whole unpleasant notion of Purgatory and takes the crucified thief straight to heaven with Our Lord,” whereas the second, “promises Paradise at some later date (to be confirmed, as it were) and leaves Purgatory nicely in the picture for the Catholics.” Britain’s union with Ireland is touched upon in the case of the Irish rebel, Sir Roger Casement, who was also “hung on a comma.” Charged under the Treason Act of 1351, Casement’s defence argued that the law was unpunctuated and therefore open to interpretation. But the magistrates, after consulting the original statute, discovered a “helpful virgule”, confirming their interpretation of the law and his guilt. A similar example is made with New Labour’s infamous dossier on Iraq which reproduced the punctuation errors from a thesis by an American doctoral student. Another case, filed by Truss, demonstrates the importance of healthy punctuating and how, if we ignore rules, we do so at “our political peril as well as to our moral detriment.” Yet, the rules of punctuation-such as whether a full stop should come in or outside quotation marks-do not just show how Britain and America are separated by their comma practice. The different usages define their divergent histories. And there are so many examples of Americans misusing punctuation in this book that we might suspect Truss of blaming the United States for things becoming so “outrageously slipshod.”
Eats, Shoots and Leaves is in many ways a lament, an elegy for a lost world without proper punctuation, for the loss of “the Queen’s English” and the fact that the bulk of its shares are now the property of the U.S. And Truss’s sense of loss is about the decay of the values she cherishes. She remembers how, as a teenager, she blasted an American pen-pal “out of the water” because of the punctuation and spelling errors in her letter; she cites, with indignation, the misreading of a line from Macbeth, in a production in New England, where, all because of a misplaced comma the actor proclaimed “Go get him, surgeons” instead of “Go, get him surgeons.” The American writer, Gertrude Stein, does not escape whipping. She is described as the “energetic enemy to all punctuation” and denounced for her description of the comma as “servile”, the semicolon as “pretentious”, for being “uninterested” in the question mark and for condemning the dash and italics.
Although there is fun to be had teasing out the furtive repressions, politics and punctuation policies of Eats, Shoots and Leaves-even if it is a little at Truss’s expense-her entertaining and instructive account on the uses and abuses of punctuation is not, at heart, anti-American. It is, rather, a “rallying cry” that goes in fear of the abandonment of standards, a “small islander’s” account of the invasion of Coca-colon and “emoticon” cultures. She may be overly pessimistic about the effects of text messaging, email and the internet, yet surely they have helped punctuation speciate by giving, for example, the military-like full stop, which calls a sentence to a halt, a rather transgressive, camp side, online, called dot. We might even want to temper Truss’s claim that “proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.” And if where we place punctuation, and the marks we prefer is partly a matter of taste, as has been argued in Eats, Shoots and Leaves, we might want to think of more versatile and illuminating terms with which to describe our practice. Perhaps, in this way, we could imagine flirtatious, democratic or superior punctuation, rather than having a “zero tolerance approach” with its tyrannical implication of correct and incorrect usage.
Michael Kinsella (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
'Lynne Truss deserves to be piled high with honours'. -- John Humphrys, Sunday Times
'Lynne Truss has written a funny and apposite book'. -- Mary Kenny, Irish Independent
'She's a soul sister. She's one of us.' -- Richard Madeley, Richard & Judy
A wonderful little treatise on the uses and misuses of punctuation. Witty and entertaining as well as informative. -- Terry Eagleton, Irish Times, November 22
Altogether enchanting...it makes you love punctuation; you want to conserve what is left and perhaps even call for more. -- Oliver Pritchett, Sunday Telegraph
Her faint scoldiness, good humour, self-deprecatory pedantry and bloody-minded doggedness make this the most enjoyable book about punctuation ever written. -- Melanie McGrath, Evening Standard
Lovers of good English have thought of ourselves as isolated outposts...Lynne Truss has emerged as our champion. -- William Hartston, Daily Express, November 22
The book of the year, really. It meets the Zeitgeist. Very quirky and enormous fun. -- Fay Weldon
This is more than a witty, elegant and passionate book that should be on every writer's shelf. Well. Done. Lynne!!!! -- Nigel Williams, The Observer Review
Truss is one of life's head girls. She's also jolly good fun, or at least her book is. -- Sarah Vine, the Times
Book Description
From the Author
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t. A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near to where I live. “Come inside,” it says, “for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s.”
If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler; that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards; but just don’t bother to go any further. For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.
It’s tough being a stickler for punctuation these days. One almost dare not get up in the mornings. True, one occasionally hears a marvellous punctuation-fan joke about a panda who “eats, shoots and leaves”, but in general the stickler’s exquisite sensibilities are assaulted from all sides, causing feelings of panic and isolation. A sign at a health club will announce, “I’ts party time, on Saturday 24th May we are have a disco/party night for free, it will be a ticket only evening.” Advertisements offer decorative services to “wall’s – ceiling’s – door’s ect”. Meanwhile a newspaper placard announces “FAN’S FURY AT STADIUM INQUIRY”, which sounds quite interesting until you look inside the paper and discover that the story concerns a quite large mob of fans, actually – not just the lone hopping-mad fan so promisingly indicated by the punctuation.
Everywhere one looks, there are signs of ignorance and indifference. What about that film Two Weeks Notice? Guaranteed to give sticklers a very nasty turn, that was – its posters slung along the sides of buses in letters four feet tall, with no apostrophe in sight. I remember, at the start of the Two Weeks Notice publicity campaign in the spring of 2003, emerging cheerfully from Victoria Station (was I whistling?) and stopping dead in my tracks with my fingers in my mouth. Where was the apostrophe? Surely there should be an apostrophe on that bus? If it were “one month’s notice” there would be an apostrophe (I reasoned); yes, and if it were “one week’s notice” there would be an apostrophe. Therefore “two weeks’ notice” requires an apostrophe! Buses that I should have caught (the 73; two 38s) sailed off up Buckingham Palace Road while I communed thus at length with my inner stickler, unable to move or, indeed, regain any sense of perspective.
Part of one’s despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else – yet we see it all the time. No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to “get a life” by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves. Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions. Being burned as a witch is not safely enough off the agenda. A sign has gone up in a local charity-shop window which says, baldly, “Can you spare any old records” (no question mark) and I dither daily outside on the pavement. Should I go in and mention it? It does matter that there’s no question mark on a direct question. It is appalling ignorance. But what will I do if the elderly charity-shop lady gives me the usual disbelieving stare and then tells me to bugger off, get a life and mind my own business?
On the other hand, I’m well aware there is little profit in asking for sympathy for sticklers. We are not the easiest people to feel sorry for. We refuse to patronise any shop with checkouts for “eight items or less” (because it should be “fewer”), and we got very worked up after 9/11 not because of Osama bin-Laden but because people on the radio kept saying “enormity” when they meant “magnitude”, and we really hate that. When we hear the construction “Mr Blair was stood” (instead of “standing”) we suck our teeth with annoyance, and when words such as “phenomena”, “media” or “cherubim” are treated as singular (“The media says it was quite a phenomena looking at those cherubims”), some of us cannot suppress actual screams. Sticklers never read a book without a pencil at hand, to correct the typographical errors. In short, we are unattractive know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families.
I know precisely when my own damned stickler personality started to get the better of me. In the autumn of 2002, I was making a series of programmes about punctuation for Radio 4 called Cutting a Dash. My producer invited John Richards of the Apostrophe Protection Society to come and talk to us. At that time, I was quite tickled by the idea of an Apostrophe Protection Society, on whose website could be found photographic examples of ungrammatical signs such as “The judges decision is final” and “No dog’s”. We took Mr Richards on a trip down Berwick Street Market to record his reaction to some greengrocers’ punctuation (“Potatoe’s” and so on), and then sat down for a chat about how exactly one goes about protecting a conventional printer’s mark that, through no fault of its own, seems to be terminally flailing in a welter of confusion.
What the APS does is write courteous letters, he said. A typical letter would explain the correct use of the apostrophe, and express the gentle wish that, should the offending “BOB,S PETS” sign (with a comma) be replaced one day, this well-meant guidance might be borne in mind. It was at this point that I felt a profound and unignorable stirring. It was the awakening of my Inner Stickler. “But that’s not enough!” I said. Suddenly I was a-buzz with ideas. What about issuing stickers printed with the words “This apostrophe is not necessary”? What about telling people to shin up ladders at dead of night with an apostrophe-shaped stencil and a tin of paint? Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?
,
Punctuation has been defined many ways. Some grammarians use the analogy of stitching: punctuation as the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape. Another writer tells us that punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop. I have even seen a rather fanciful reference to the full stop and comma as “the invisible servants in fairy tales – the ones who bring glasses of water and pillows, not storms of weather or love”. But best of all, I think, is the simple advice given by the style book of a national newspaper: that punctuation is “a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling”.
Isn’t the analogy with good manners perfect? Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves. It is no accident that the word “punctilious” (“attentive to formality or etiquette”) comes from the same original root word as punctuation. As we shall see, the practice of “pointing” our writing has always been offered in a spirit of helpfulness, to underline meaning and prevent awkward misunderstandings between writer and reader. In 1644 a schoolmaster from Southwark, Richard Hodges, wrote in his The English Primrose that “great care ought to be had in writing, for the due observing of points: for, the neglect thereof will pervert the sense”, and he quoted as an example, “My Son, if sinners intise [entice] thee consent thou, not refraining thy foot from their way.” Imagine the difference to the sense, he says, if you place the comma after the word “not”: “My Son, if sinners intise thee consent thou not, refraining thy foot from their way.” This was the 1644 equivalent of Ronnie Barker in Porridge, reading the sign-off from a fellow lag’s letter from home, “Now I must go and get on my lover”, and then pretending to notice a comma, so hastily changing it to, “Now I must go and get on, my lover.”
To be fair, many people who couldn’t punctuate their way out of a paper bag are still interested in the way punctuation can alter the sense of a string of words. It is the basis of all “I’m sorry, I’ll read that again” jokes. Instead of “What would you with the king?” you can have someone say in Marlowe’s Edward II, “What? Would you? With the king?” The consequences of mispunctuation (and re-punctuation) have appealed to both great and little minds, and in the age of the fancy-that email a popular example is the comparison of two sentences:
A woman, without her man, is nothing. A woman: without her...
