One-Trick Panda: Eats, Shoots & Leaves

If you're a language-lover, you may know that Eats, Shoots and Leaves , an odd little volume with an even odder subtitle --The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation -- has spent 32 weeks on the New York Times Best-Seller List, and counting. This, after a smash UK debut in 2003.

Self-described stickler Lynne Truss and her one-trick panda have taken both sides of the pond by storm with a book only a grammarphile could love. And not every grammarphile, at that. But for those who have spent many a pleasant evening curled up with the Chicago Manual of Style or have long known Mr. Fowler on a first-name basis, it's clear why this book is both popular and controversial.

Much as we may admire Truss's devotion to punctuation and appreciate the many anecdotes she recounts in support of its essential linguistic functions, very few readers will accept all of her punctuational decrees. Take that panda, for example, the one ripped from a grammar joke and memorialized in the book's title.

The joke's punch line, meant to be a quote from a "badly punctuated wildlife manual," explains why the panda shoots a gun in the air after eating a sandwich in a cafe and before making for the door:

    "Panda. Large black-and-white bearlike mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves. "

Had I written that last sentence, I would certainly have inserted an additional comma, after the word shoots and before and. A comma placed before the final item in a list is known as the Oxford or serial comma. In Britain, as Truss points out, standard usage is to omit the comma ("Eats, shoots and leaves"), while in the USA, standard usage is to put it in ("Eats, shoots, and leaves"). It would, however, be unwise to make assumptions about a person's Oxford comma predilections based on such a minor point as nationality. Truss, herself, believes that "sometimes a sentence is improved by including it; sometimes it isn't."

Which should give you an idea why this book should hardly be considered a reference work. Rather, it is an extended essay on the history, purpose, and sheer joy of punctuation marks, one that has been left essentially unchanged for the North American market aside from a brief preface highlighting some differences between British and American usage.  Many a critic has found fault with Truss as a stylist, on both logical and aesthetic grounds. Notably, Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker, is irritated and perplexed that "a person who is not just vague about the rules but disinclined to follow them [should] bother to produce a guide to punctuation."

From my point of view, the book is breezy, opinionated, and funny, at least for starters. Inevitably, perhaps, it becomes a one-trick panda. How many egregiously misplaced apostrophes, tidbits of printers' lore, and arch paeans to standards can fit comfortably within 200 very small pages of very large print? (That's a rhetorical question, not a light bulb joke.)

Regardless, everyone who loves the English language and avidly follows its fortunes should take a stab at this book. More than likely, you'll find a passage or two or three to make you laugh out loud, and a couple to remind you why care so much about our language in the first place.