[The Montana Professor 15.2, Spring 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Lynne Truss
New York: Gotham Books, 2004 (2003)
204 pp., $17.50 hc
R.E. Walton
Philosophy
UM-Missoula
Eats, Shoots & Leaves brings to mind one sort of personal failing I thought I had long since overcome and threatens to provoke its rejuvenation. By nature I am what Ms. Truss calls a "stickler," i.e., one acutely sensitive to transgressions of the rules and conventions of the mother tongue. In times past, before being brought to heel by my patient spouse, I would, for example, be unable to let pass an x-ray technician's instruction to "lay down" upon its being uttered a third time (two I could bear). I once called a television news reporter who had informed the audience that some officer of public safety had "responded to 1643 South Boardwalk"--only after I'd heard this barbarism from him several times, of course. "Do you have more information about the crime?" the reporter asked. "No," I replied, "I have information about the meaning of the word 'respond.'" I gave up this occasional indulgence in irritability and learned to turn the other ear, so to speak, not only in order to spare my beloved embarrassment, but because it finally became apparent to me that the cause was hopeless. The technician would listen politely to my explanation of the difference between "lie" and "lay" and then tell me to "lay still" while she took the picture. The grocery manager explained that the express checkout lane's sign didn't read "10 items or fewer" because it had "less letters" the way it was. I became cynical--or realistic (it's hard to tell the difference when it comes to language these days).
Now arrives Lynne Truss, issuing a stirring rallying cry to all us sticklers, seeking to promote linguistic vigilantism (34). "What I propose is action. Sticklers unite, you have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion, and arguably you didn't have a lot of that to begin with"(28). This is a woman who once stood in front of a movie theatre holding an apostrophe aloft on a stick to show where one was needed in the title on the marquee (19). (I feel better about calling that TV reporter.) She writes, "...I...have an Inner Stickler that, having been unleashed, is now roaring, salivating and clawing the air in a quite alarming manner" (29). She means to rekindle the fires of linguistic indignation in me.
But it is a book about punctuation, for heaven's sake! Mere jots and tittles, the inventions of copyists and printers. Can punctuation be interesting? Can any but a jotter or tittler actually be captivated by an essay about it? Apparently so, for hers is an extremely charming little book, one of those one wants desperately to read straight through, other responsibilities be damned. One can readily understand why it stood near the top of best seller lists in Britain and the U.S. for the past two years
Ms. Truss rightly recognizes that little is at stake beyond regularity in many of the controversies over points of punctuation. For example, the British prefer to place punctuation marks outside of closing quotation marks, while we in the U.S. (at least those of us with editorial responsibilities) are sure the sky will fall if we don't put those stops inside that quotation mark (except for the semi-colon, one of my manuals instructs me). Similarly, there is the Oxford comma, the one preceding the "and" in a list: "...ham, eggs, and chips" (30). Superfluous you say? It usually matters not (but see Fowler for examples where it does).
At the other end of the scale of importance are the many cases where the presence, absence or placement of a punctuation mark makes a great deal of difference in the meaning of the words. "Leonora walked on her head, a little higher than usual" (97). And there is the example from the book's title. A panda walks into a café, orders a sandwich, and eats it. He takes out a pistol and fires it into the air. As he is making his way to the door the proprietor stops him and demands to know what he thinks he is doing. "I'm a panda," says the bear, "look it up," and tosses the man a wildlife encyclopedia. There it is, under the entry for Panda: "Eats, shoots and leaves." These are the interesting cases; the others may perhaps be dismissed as cultural curiosities.
Thus, when it comes to punctuation, one risks being foolishly fussy at the one end, and at the other being merely foolish by saying something quite different from what was intended (or something entirely incomprehensible). Ms. Truss tells us, "My own position is simple: in some matters of punctuation there are simple rights and wrongs; in others, one must apply a good ear to good sense" (27). Our author attempts to steer us through this Skylla and Charydbis with five informative chapters on punctuation signs, each as entertaining as it is instructive: "The Tractable Apostrophe"; "That'll Do, Comma"; "Airs and Graces"; "Cutting a Dash"; and, "A Little Used Punctuation Mark." Preceding these chapters (2-6) is Ch. 1, "Introduction--The Seventh Sense." Following it is "Merely Conventional Signs," a chapter devoted to a consideration of the possible effects upon our writing of the widespread use of e-mail, and, more ominously, text messaging.
Ms. Truss's writing style is lively and fresh; for example, she likes to illustrate her points in the very sentences in which she sets them before us. We learn a great deal about the history of punctuation, and the various marks we now take for granted (and likely abuse). For example, I had supposed that the striking difference in the use of the comma in eighteenth and nineteenth century prose, as compared with our own time, was simply another manifestation of the general tendency toward functionalism that we also see in architecture. But it may well have been due to the influence of Richard Mulcaster's The First Part of the Elementarie (1582), an English grammar book whose description of the comma was copied by similar books for 300 years (71). Truss informs us that "...between the 16th century and the present day, it [the comma] became a kind of scary grammatical sheepdog...it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organizing words into sensible groups and making them stay put: sorting and dividing; circling and herding;..."(79).
Much of our modern system of punctuation we apparently owe to the genius of one man.
That man was Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450-1515) and I will happily admit I hadn't heard of him until about a year ago, but am now absolutely kicking myself that I never volunteered to have his babies.
The heroic status of Aldus Manutius the Elder among historians of the printed word cannot be overstated. Who invented the italic typeface? Aldus Manutius! Who printed the first semicolon? Aldus Manutius! The rise of printing in the 14th and 15th centuries meant that a standard sytem of punctuation was urgently required, and Aldus Manutius was the man to do it. In Pause and Effect (1992), Malcolm Parkes's magisterial account of the history of punctuation in the West, facsimile examples of Aldus's groundbreaking work include a page from Pietro Bembo's De Aetna (1494) which features not only a very elegant roman typeface but the actual first semicolon (and believe me, this is exciting). (77)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves disabused me of one naïve notion I hesitate to admit having harbored; I thought that the English, as citizens of the birthplace of the mother tongue, must surely guard it jealously; ordinary language there must be relatively free of the solecisms so prominent here. But that is not so: in fact, many of the same infirmities we regularly observe here are found there. Ms. Truss fairly waxes apoplectic over the many cases of misplaced or omitted apostrophes she has observed. She finds in her precincts the same sort of thing I recently saw on a church marquee near my home. "Christs True Passion" apparently advertised a sermon to be offered by a minister who would go Mel Gibson one better Sunday next. I felt the stickler surging up within me, and recalling an illustration on the dust jacket of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, thoughts of sneaking over in the night and repairing the sign flashed through my mind--followed rapidly by imagined scenes of arrest for vandalism. I was dismayed to learn that the English, too, were stricken by the epidemic that once laid hold of the population from which our own students are drawn, the inability to utter a declarative sentence except with the inflection proper only to questions. Truss attributes this vexing affectation (against which even well-educated adults in the U.S. were not immune) to the influence of a popular television show, Neighbors. What its provenance may have been here I do not know; but, thank heaven, it seems to have nearly run its course.
And then we have what I have called the Plains quotation, after its long-standing appearance on the menu of a café in the city of that name (whether Georgia or Montana discretion prohibits me from disclosing). The menu features sandwiches with "Special" sauce. Examples cited in Eats, Shoots & Leaves imply that now I may as well call this the London quotation, for it appears there frequently, too (though the English prefer single quotes, it seems--see pp. 148-150). The worst case of this bizarre use of quotation marks I ever encountered was on a restaurant billboard which advertised "Good" food: I didn't go in. For a long time this one baffled me. How could such a mistake have been made in the first place, and become nearly ubiquitous? By induction I concluded that the intent was to emphasize the word enclosed in the misplaced marks. Hence, it must have been that some fool saw an instance of what we clever scholars call "scare quotes" and took them to indicate emphasis. When next he wished to call attention to one word or phrase on a sign or menu he enclosed it in quotation marks. We got "this" when !this! was intended. But he was no ordinary fool, for he became a veritable linguistic Typhoid Mary, spreading his blunder about the English writing world with the reach and rapidity of the annual epidemic of Hong Kong flu. He must have been, then, a person of extraordinary power and influence, a celebrity fool, perhaps. Now if Lynne Truss had invented this account she would have recommended it as evidence of the value of a well-timed stickler's rebuke, which may sometimes, the theory shows, be as effective as quarantine in halting the spread of a noxious bacillus.
Has the book any faults, then? I searched diligently to find some, hoping to save myself from Ms. Truss's siren song. Fortunately, I found a few. This American edition of the book is simply a reprint of the original British volume, with a very brief "Foreword" by novelist Frank McCourt. Consequently, the book occasionally includes idiomatic expressions unfamiliar to Americans, and the author is not above indulging in that familiar European conceit of relative sophistication (in comparison to ourselves), this despite disavowing the common attribution of English barbarisms to American influence at the outset of her treatise. To be entirely fair on this point, these little jabs are rare, and she does toss us a bone once or twice (e.g., 189). More importantly, she clearly indicates differences between British and American punctuation practices. We may fault her, too, for a very few linguistic lapses of her own. The one persistent solecism I noticed was the use of plural pronouns with singular referents, no doubt the familiar effort to avoid appearing to limit reference to one gender. One could easily adduce numerous examples of the confusion created by this practice, doing so fully in the spirit--and with the style--of her own illustrations of mistaken placement of marks of punctuation.
The failing that I found most serious, and most interesting, is that the book's theory is not quite up to the level of its ample evidence. Early on the author declares, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves is not a book about grammar. I am not a grammarian"(32 ). But some part of that portion of punctuation which she correctly says is governed by requirements that make our efforts either clearly right or clearly wrong belongs to the sphere of grammar. The very title of her delightful book illustrates the point. The erroneously inserted comma in the alleged wildlife encyclopedia entry for Panda turns what were intended to be nouns, the objects of the verb "to eat," into verbs. The comma, in short, effects a grammatical transformation, and therefore has a grammatical function. That punctuation may frequently do this derives, I believe, from the fact that English makes heavy use of word order, rhythm, and inflection in its syntax. Many other languages alter the words themselves to indicate case, the problem in the title line. For such languages (Greek and Latin are good examples) punctuation might matter much less than it does for us. We could draw other examples (meant for other purposes, of course) from the text, and we can easily make up our own.
These weaknesses are but minor flaws in a marvelous and valuable book, however. I fully intend to order it for a class the first time I have the least pretext. Buy it! Read it! But if you suspect at all that there might be an inner stickler in you, do it soon, before your spouse hears about the book and tries to keep it out of your hands.
[The Montana Professor 15.2, Spring 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]