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

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

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.”

This joke, which appears right at home as a filler on a page of Reader’s Digest and hardly calls for a round of badum tish, has become a classic illustration of the importance of correct punctuation since the publication of the bestselling book that made it famous several years ago. The book in question is Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. “So, punctuation really does matter,” the book says, “even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death.”

I’m a self-styled grammar and punctuation stickler, but I’ll be the first one to admit that the chances of a black-and-white, primarily herbivorous bear-like animal entering your business establishment or even your home, eating your burger and fries, firing gunshots in the air, then exiting as though what it just did was perfectly normal on account of an extraneous comma in a reference book that transformed a pairing of a simple present tense transitive verb (eats) and its noun-phrase direct compound object (shoots and leaves) into a series of simple present tense habitual verbs (eats, shoots and leaves) are practically nil. Translation: Don’t panic. Unless pandas stop being complacent and go beyond cutely eating bamboo shoots and leaves and cutely sneezing to their mothers’ surprise in YouTube videos by developing the advanced facility to read and the even more advanced ability to recognize ambiguities caused by grammatical faux pas, we don’t have to worry about them taking our favorite food and endangering our precious lives. But I stand firm like the sarcasm-denoting temherte slaq (although I’m in no way being sarcastic) in supporting Truss’s (yes, that’s an apostrophe and an s) proposition that we pay attention every now and then if not ideally all the time to proper grammar and punctuation. I told you I’m a stickler.

“Sticklers, unite!” is Truss’s battlecry, and its reverberations are felt throughout the book. She is, of course, calling for grammatical sticklers like her to band together and counter the decline of punctuation, which may or may not be the decline of civilization itself. For those who don’t know what a grammatical stickler is, Truss gives a pretty accurate definition:

Grammatical sticklers are the worst people for finding common cause because it is in their nature (obviously) to pick holes in everyone, even their best friends. Honestly, what an annoying bunch of people.

Indeed, Truss, not unlike her stickler friends (myself included), can be so annoying and ruthless as to say,

To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as “Thank God its Friday” (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive “its” (no apostrophe) with the contractive “it’s” (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian “kill” response in the average stickler.

Apparently, I’m no average stickler, or else I’d be guilty of multiple homicide. Thank God.

With playful chapter titles like “That’ll Do, Comma” and “Cutting a Dash,” Truss puts forth both a brief history of punctuation and a straightforward punctuation guide in Eats, Shoots & Leaves. She considers, not without humor and self-reference, the versatile apostrophe (which greengrocers tend to violate in their signs for “FRESH FRUIT AND VEGETABLE’S”), the ubiquitous comma (whose appearance has been likened by Nicholson Baker to “the pedals of grand pianos, mosquito larvae, paisleys, adult nostril openings, the spiralling decays of fundamental particles, the prows of gondolas”), the intoning question mark (of which Gertrude Stein was not a fan), and the snooty semicolon (which Donald Barthelme thought was “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly”), among other common punctuation marks. She also mentions the rise of the punctuation mark-based emoticon and, in the manner of Roger Ebert pointing the finger on the growing popularity of e-books for what he perceives as the present generation’s underappreciation of The Great Gatsby and 10,000 Jokes, Toasts and Stories (It took me great restraint not to put an Oxford comma between Toasts and and.), says that the Internet—you know, that place with all the grammatically challenged but deadly cute feline creatures—and text messaging are partly responsible for the widespread mistreatment of the subtle art of punctuation.

Truss is a prolific print and broadcast journalist hailing from England, and Eats, Shoots & Leaves is decidedly British, retaining its British English conventions in its American edition. But Truss, rather scathingly, makes sure to point out a few important differences between American and British English punctuation terms and rules, with which the very British Lord Voldemort himself agrees:

You say “parentheses” while we say “brackets”—but to people who call an apostrophe “one of them floating comma things” it doesn’t matter very much. They are unlikely to spot that American usage interestingly places all terminal punctuation inside closing quotation marks, while British usage sometimes “picks and chooses”. (Like that.)

All the same, whether you’re on this side of the Atlantic or that, whether you’re inclined to write, “A woman, without her man, is nothing,” or “A woman: without her, man is nothing,” and whether you uphold the Oxford comma or not, there’s something to like about and plenty to learn from Truss and her trigger-happy panda.