Read Eats, Shoots & Leaves Online
Authors: Lynne Truss
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
GOTHAM BOOKS
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Published by Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Originally published in Great Britain in 2003 by Profile Books, Ltd.
First American Electronic Edition, April 2004
Copyright © 2003 by Lynne Truss
Foreword copyright © 2004 by Frank McCourt
All rights reserved
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ISBN: 978-1-1012-1829-7
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To the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution
Thanks are due to the many writers on punctuation who did all the hard work of formulating the clear rules I have doubtless muddied in this book. G. V. Carey’s
Mind the Stop
(1939) and Eric Partridge’s
You Have a Point There
(1953) are acknowledged classics; modern writers such as David Crystal, Loreto Todd, Graham King, Keith Waterhouse, Tim Austin, Kingsley Amis, Philip Howard, Nicholson Baker, William Hartston and R. L. Trask were all inspirational. Special thanks go to Cathy Stewart, Anne Baker and Gillian Forrester; also to Penny Vine, who set me off on this journey in the first place. Nigel Hall told me the panda joke; Michael Handelzalts told me about the question mark in Hebrew; and Adam Beeson told me where to find the dash on my keyboard. Learned copy-editors have attempted to
sort out my commas and save me from embarrassment. I thank them very much. Where faults obstinately remain, they are mine alone. Finally, I would like to thank Andrew Franklin for his encouraging involvement along the way, and the hundreds of readers who generously responded to articles in
The Daily Telegraph
,
The Author
and
Writers’ News
. It was very good to know that I was not alone.
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 semicolon 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 typeface 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
Lynne Truss’s
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
has been reprinted exactly as it was in its original British edition, complete with British examples, spellings and, yes, punctuation. There are a few subtle differences between British and American punctuation which the author has addressed in her preface to the North American edition. Any attempt at a complete Americanization of this book would have been akin to an effort to Americanize the Queen of England: futile and, this publisher feels, misguided. Please enjoy this narrative history of punctuation as it was meant to be enjoyed, bone-dry humour and cultural references intact, courtesy of Lynne Truss and all of us here at Gotham Books.
To be clear from the beginning: no one involved in the production of
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
expected the words “runaway” and “bestseller” would ever be associated with it, let alone upon the cover of an American edition. Had the Spirit of Christmas Bestsellers Yet to Come knocked at the rather modest front door of my small London publisher in the summer of 2003 and said, “I see hundreds of thousands of copies of your little book about punctuation sold before Christmas. It will be debated in every national newspaper and mentioned, yea, even in the House of Lords, where a woman named Lady Strange—I kid thee not—will actually tell the panda joke,” I’m afraid the Spirit would have been sent whiffling off down Clerkenwell Road with the sound of merry, disbelieving laughter ringing in its
ears. “Lady Strange,” we would have repeated, chuckling, for hours afterwards. “Honestly, what are these prophetic spirits of old London town
coming to
these days?”
Personally, I clung on to one thing when
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
began its rush up the charts. Since the rallying cry for the book had been chosen pretty early on, I referred to it continually to steady my nerves and remind myself of my original aspirations—which were certainly plucky but at the same time not the least bit confident of universal appeal. “Sticklers unite!” I had written as this rallying cry. “You have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion (and arguably you didn’t have a lot of that to begin with).” There you are, then. My hopes for
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
were bold but bathetic; chirpy but feet-on-the-ground; presumptuous yet significantly parenthetical. My book was aimed at the tiny minority of British people “who love punctuation and don’t like to see it mucked about with”. When my own mother suggested we print on the front of the book “For the select few,” I was hurt, I admit it; I bit my lip and blinked a tear. Yet I knew what she meant. I am the writer, after all, who once wrote a
whole comic novel about Lewis Carroll and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and expected other people to be interested. Oh yes, I have learned that lesson the hard way.
I still have no idea whether sticklers are uniting in the UK, but I somehow doubt it, despite the staggering sales. 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. One supporter of
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
wrote a 1,400-word column in
The Times
of London explaining (with glorious self-importance) that while his admiration for my purpose was “total”, he disagreed with virtually everything I said. So I am not sure my stickler-chums are, as I write this, sitting down to get things sorted out. What did become depressingly clear, however, was that my personal hunches about the state of the language were horribly correct: standards of punctuation in general in the UK are indeed approaching the point of illiteracy; self-justified philistines (“Get a life!”) are truly in the driving seat of our culture; and a lot of well-educated sensitive people really have been
weeping friendlessly in caves for the past few years, praying for someone—anyone—to write a book about punctuation with a panda on the cover.
I don’t know how bad things are in America, but in the UK I cannot emphasise it enough: standards of punctuation are abysmal. Encouraged to conduct easy tests on television, I discovered to my horror that most British people truly do not know their apostrophe from their elbow. “I’m an Oxbridge intellectual,” slurred a chap in Brighton, where we were asking passers-by to “pin the apostrophe on the sentence” for a harmless afternoon chat-show. He immediately placed an apostrophe (oh no!) in a possessive “its”. The high-profile editor of a national newspaper made the same mistake on a morning show, scoring two correct points out of a possible seven. On a TV news bulletin, the results of a vox pop item were shown on screen under the heading “Grammer Test”—the spelling of which I assumed was a joke until I realised nobody in the studio was laughing. Meanwhile well-wishers sent hundreds of delightful/horrific examples of idiotic sign-writing, my current favourite being the roadside warning
CHILDREN DRIVE SLOWLY
—courtesy of the wonderful
Shakespearean actor Timothy West. Evidently, this sign—inadvertently descriptive of the disappointing road speeds attainable by infants at the wheel—was eventually altered (but sadly not improved) by the addition of a comma, becoming
CHILDREN
,
DRIVE SLOWLY
—a kindly exhortation, perhaps, which might even save lives among those self-same reckless juvenile road-users; but still not quite what the writer really had in mind.
By far the oddest and most demoralising response to my book, however, took place at a bookshop event in Piccadilly. It is a story that, if nothing else, proves the truth of that depressing old adage about taking a horse to water. I was signing copies of my book when a rather bedraggled woman came up and said, despairingly, “Oh, I’d
love
to learn about punctuation.” Spotting a sure thing (you know how it is), I said with a little laugh, “Then this is the book for you, madam!” I believe my pen actually hovered above the dedication page, as I waited for her to tell me her name.
“No, I mean it,” she insisted—as if I had disagreed with her. “I really would
love
to know how to do it. I mean, I did learn it at school, but I’ve forgotten
it now, and it’s awful. I put all my commas in the wrong place, and as for the apostrophe . . . !” I nodded, still smiling. This all seemed familiar enough. “So shall I sign it to anyone in particular?” I said. “And I’m a
teacher,
” she went on. “And I’m quite ashamed really, not knowing about grammar and all that; so I’d love to know about punctuation, but the trouble is,
there’s just nowhere you can turn, is there?
”
This was quite unsettling. She shrugged, defeated, and I hoped she would go away. I said again that the book really did explain many basic things about punctuation; she said again that the basic things of punctuation were
exactly
what nobody was ever prepared to explain to an adult person. I must admit, I started to wonder feverishly whether I was being secretly filmed by publishers of rival punctuation books who had set up the whole thing. I even wondered briefly: had any author in Hatchards (a bookseller established in 1797) ever hit a customer, or was I destined to be the first? Throughout the encounter, I kept smiling at her and nodding at the book, but she never took the hint. In the end, thank goodness, she slid away, leaving me to put my coat over my head and scream.
It was the same kind of strenuous apathy, I suppose, that I refer to on page
ref
, drawing on the deathless line in Woody Allen’s
Small Time Crooks
: “I’ve always wanted to know how to spell Connecticut.” I tend to feel that if a person genuinely wants to know how to spell Connecticut, you see, they will make efforts to look it up. Or, failing that, if a book announcing itself as
The Only Way to Spell Connecticut is This
is to be found in heaps on a table in front of them, they will think, “Hang on, I might get this!” But it turns out there are people whom you simply cannot help, because it suits them to say, with a shrug, “Do you know, I’ve always wanted to know how to use an apostrophe—and oh dear, I don’t know how to wash my hair either.” The fact that these people are sometimes editors of national newspapers and Oxbridge intellectuals is just an indication of how low our society’s intellectual aspirations have sunk.
It is customary in the UK, incidentally, to blame all examples of language erosion on the pernicious influence of the US. Certainly American spellings
are creeping in to our shop signs (
GLAMOR GIRL
! I noticed in a huge chain pharmacy over Christmas—where it ought to have been “Glamour” with a “u”). But in the case of our deteriorating understanding of commas and apostrophes, we have no one to blame but ourselves. While significant variations exist between British and American usage, these are matters for quite rarefied concern. You say “parentheses” while we say “brackets” (see page
ref
)—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.) People who identify “that dot-thing” as the mark at the end of a sentence probably don’t care that the American “period” is the equivalent of the British “full stop”, or that “exclamation point” is the US way of saying “exclamation mark”. We probably don’t use the term “inverted commas” as much as we used to in Britain, but nobody in America has forced us to give them up.
My American correspondents, however, have
made it pretty clear that the US is not immune to similar levels of public illiteracy. Carved in stone (in
stone,
mind you) in a Florida shopping mall one may see the splendidly apt quotation from Euripides, “Judge a tree from it’s fruit: not the leaves”—and it is all too easy to imagine the stone-mason dithering momentarily over that monumental apostrophe, mallet in hand, chisel poised. Can an apostrophe ever be wrong, he asks himself, as he answers “Nah!” and decisively strikes home and the chips fly out. Meanwhile a casual drive in America is quite as horrifying to a stickler as it is in the UK.
CHILDRENS HOME
;
READERS OUTLET
;
PLEASE DO NOT LOCK THIS DOOR BETWEEN THE HOUR
’
S OF
9
AM AND
6:30
PM
.
Might the tide turn, however? Are there any reasons to be cheerful on behalf of punctuation? Well, there is one—and although modesty ought to forbid me from mentioning it, it is the astonishing response
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
has had in the UK. Some may say that the British are obsessed with class difference and that knowing your apostrophes is a way of belittling the uneducated. To which accusation, I say (mainly), “Pah!” How can it be a matter of class difference when ignorance is universal?
Why should it only be middle-class people who care about the language? I come personally from a working-class background. I went to a state school, and there are many street traders in my immediate family. Punctuation is no more a class issue than the air we breathe. It is a system of printers’ marks that has aided the clarity of the written word for the past half-millennium, and if its time has come to be replaced, let’s just use this moment to celebrate what an elegant and imaginative job it did while it had the chance. Caring about matters of language is unfortunately generally associated with small-minded people, but that doesn’t make it a small issue. The disappearance of punctuation (including word spacing, capital letters, and so on) indicates an enormous shift in our attitude to the written word, and nobody knows where it will end.
In the meantime, however, I suggest that we ponder the case of Defeatist Bookshop Woman, and consider what she must be like to live with. I may even have to write a fictional character based on her. I can see her now, holding up the queue at an ice-cream vendor, explaining her predicament: “If only
one could get an ice cream from somewhere, but it’s hopeless!” Or standing outside Lincoln Center with a ticket labelled “Bolshoi” in her hand, saying, “If only I could see a ballet once in my life! But I suppose it’s not to be.”