Friday, December 19, 2003
The crux of the biscuit is the apostrophe too
Here's a hilarious piece on the joys of punctuation. It's such a good read I am tempted to post the entire story (basically a review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation ) here, but I shall give in to the fear of copyright law (not that I know either way) and just stick with a couple of extracts.
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, draws a gun and fires. As he is on his way out, the waiter asks him why. The panda hands him a badly punctuated wildlife manual. The waiter reads, “Panda: Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” Punctuation, says Lynne Truss, is the track along which language runs. When it breaks down, so does meaning. She illustrates her point with countless cheerful examples. Where, for instance, would extra-marital sex be without its hyphen? In a completely different moral sphere.
Why, when other punctuation manuals are on the market (The Economist's style book is available at a very reasonable £16.99), is this one a bestseller? Timing. As people worry about the white rhino only when it is nearly extinct, so they defend punctuation only when it is endangered. The threat is not so much the greengrocer's apostrophe—his tomato's have been on sale for decades—as e-mails and text messages. In the first, speed undermines precision; in the second, brevity destroys form. Worse, both use sacred marks for their profane little emoticons :-) It's enough to drive one to an exclamation mark!
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, draws a gun and fires. As he is on his way out, the waiter asks him why. The panda hands him a badly punctuated wildlife manual. The waiter reads, “Panda: Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” Punctuation, says Lynne Truss, is the track along which language runs. When it breaks down, so does meaning. She illustrates her point with countless cheerful examples. Where, for instance, would extra-marital sex be without its hyphen? In a completely different moral sphere.
Why, when other punctuation manuals are on the market (The Economist's style book is available at a very reasonable £16.99), is this one a bestseller? Timing. As people worry about the white rhino only when it is nearly extinct, so they defend punctuation only when it is endangered. The threat is not so much the greengrocer's apostrophe—his tomato's have been on sale for decades—as e-mails and text messages. In the first, speed undermines precision; in the second, brevity destroys form. Worse, both use sacred marks for their profane little emoticons :-) It's enough to drive one to an exclamation mark!
