'Eats Shoots & Leaves'

I'm currently reading a great little volume entitled Eats Shoots & Leaves. Written by Lynne Truss, and sub-titled 'The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation', this book earned the accolade of 'Book of the Year 2004'. the title comes from a joke:

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 is a book, as you may well have gathered by now, about the misuse of punctuation. It's one of my personal bugbears that not only has spelling been considered as irrelevant in the education system for many years, but also that punctuation appears to be neglected almost to the point of its imminent demise.

Of course, people realise that punctuation exists, and they even think that they know how to use it, although so often they are sadly ignorant, particularly when it comes to the use of the apostrophe. Hence you will find signs proclaiming items for sale such as potato's, tomato's, video's, Cd's etc.

Of course the abuse of the apostrophe is not confined to placing it where it has no right to be, but also to omitting it from where it should be. Recently a council erected a sign proclaiming that the name of a road was St Johns Close. Now the obvious question that this raises is 'To what or to where?' Will we ever discover to what St John is close to? I doubt it. The reason that this item made the national press was because someone rather like myself, easily offended by the ignorance that persists when it comes to the use of the apostrophe, painted one in, thereby correcting the sign to read St John's Close. Rather than applauding him for correcting the erroneous omission he was derided as a vandal!

Ignorance about punctuation is something that I personally come across on a regular basis because of my name. My surname is hyphenated, not, as is often the case today, because my parents were unmarried and made up a name from both of theirs, or because they wanted the family name to sound posher, but because it brought together two families several generations ago. When asked for my name I respond by saying that my surname is Gordon-Farleigh and that my Christian name is Colin, whereupon so often I am then immediately address as Mr Farleigh or, as is often the case nowadays, by using what is presumed to be my Christian name, 'Gordon'! What it proves to me more than anything is that the party concerned, having asked the question, has no real interest in the answer, for they prove that they have not listened as soon as they open their mouth.

Just imagine how difficult life would be without any punctuation:

there are three hundred and sixty five days in the year starting on january the first and running through to the end of december i like the latter part best because i like the cold weather and snow which do you like is it the warmer seasons like summer and autumn or perhaps the spring do you like that perhaps because its a time when things start to grow and the air is fresh

Then there are the examples of people who seem to have grabbed a handful of commas and thrown them up in the air, letting them settle wherever they happen to land:

The young man said after he was dead, that he wished to be laid, to rest in a wooded copse.

There are, of course, many vagaries in the English language, yet the general level of understanding is not increased by the constant abuse of punctuation, either by its misuse or its absence.

Good bedtime reading for the 'Sticklers' like myself, this book is published by Profile Books, and the ISBN is 1 86197 6127. If nothing else it will make you smile!