Lynne Truss - Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Punctuation Grammar Comedy

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation is a non-fiction book written by Lynne Truss, the former host of the BBC Radio 4's Cutting a Dash program. In the book, published in 2003, Truss bemoans the state of punctuation in the United Kingdom and the United States, and describes how rules are being relaxed in today's society. Her goal is to remind readers of the importance of punctuation in the English language by mixing humor and instruction.

Truss dedicates the book "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."


The title of the book is an amphibology—a verbal fallacy arising from an ambiguous grammatical construction—and derived from a joke on bad punctuation:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

'Well, I'm a panda', he says, at the door. 'Look it up.'

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots, and leaves.'


Editorial Reviews -

http://www.amazon.com/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Tolerance-Punctuation/dp/1592400876

From Publishers Weekly

Who would have thought a book about punctuation could cause such a sensation? Certainly not its modest if indignant author, who began her surprise hit motivated by "horror" and "despair" at the current state of British usage: ungrammatical signs ("BOB,S PETS"), headlines ("DEAD SONS PHOTOS MAY BE RELEASED") and band names ("Hear'Say") drove journalist and novelist Truss absolutely batty. But this spirited and wittily instructional little volume, which was a U.K. #1 bestseller, is not a grammar book, Truss insists; like a self-help volume, it "gives you permission to love punctuation." Her approach falls between the descriptive and prescriptive schools of grammar study, but is closer, perhaps, to the latter. (A self-professed "stickler," Truss recommends that anyone putting an apostrophe in a possessive "its"-as in "the dog chewed it's bone"-should be struck by lightning and chopped to bits.) Employing a chatty tone that ranges from pleasant rant to gentle lecture to bemused dismay, Truss dissects common errors that grammar mavens have long deplored (often, as she readily points out, in isolation) and makes elegant arguments for increased attention to punctuation correctness: "without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning." Interspersing her lessons with bits of history (the apostrophe dates from the 16th century; the first semicolon appeared in 1494) and plenty of wit, Truss serves up delightful, unabashedly strict and sometimes snobby little book, with cheery Britishisms ("Lawks-a-mussy!") dotting pages that express a more international righteous indignation.


From Booklist

This impassioned manifesto on punctuation made the best-seller lists in Britain and has followed suit here. Journalist Truss gives full rein to her "inner stickler" in lambasting common grammatical mistakes. Asserting that punctuation "directs you how to read in the way musical notation directs a musician how to play," Truss argues wittily and with gusto for the merits of preserving the apostrophe, using commas correctly, and resurrecting the proper use of the lowly semicolon. Filled with dread at the sight of ubiquitous mistakes in store signs and headlines, Truss eloquently speaks to the value of punctuation in preserving the nuances of language. Liberally sprinkling the pages with Briticisms ("Lawks-a-mussy") and moving from outright indignation to sarcasm to bone-dry humor, Truss turns the finer points of punctuation into spirited reading.

Product Details

* Audio CD
* Publisher: Penguin Audio; abridged edition (April 22, 2004)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0142800821
* ISBN-13: 978-0142800829
* Read by the Author


01. An Introduction To Pedantry
02. Sticklers For Punctuation
03. Keeping Sense On The Rails
04. History Of Punctuation
05. The Apostrophe
06. More About The Apostrophe
07. Complex Uses Of The Apostrophe
08. The Beginnings Of Punctuation
09. Commas
10. The American Penfriend
11. Semi-Colons & Colons
12. The Semi-Colon Police
13. The Exclamation Mark
14. Question Marks And Speech
15. Finishing Speech Marks
16. Brackets
17. Hyphenated Noun-Phrases
18. Despair Leads To A Book
19. The End


http://www.lynnetruss.com/


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynne_Truss


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves