From Mark Flanagan,
Your Guide to Contemporary Literature.
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ISBN: 1592400876
Gotham Books, 2004

Lynn Truss is a grammarian's grammarian, though she claims not to be one at all. Her recent bestseller, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, is simultaneously a fun-filled romp through the writer's playground called punctuation and a call to action for punctuation sticklers to unite and rise up against the burgeoning illiteracy of the 21st century. With "Sticklers Unite!" as her rallying cry, Ms. Truss modestly presumed a rather narrow scope of mostly British appeal for her book. She did not expect Eats, Shoots & Leaves to become a bestseller, and certainly not in the American market.

The book is full of quips and jabs at the appalling state of punctuation in today's world and the sad fact that "self-justified philistines ('Get a life!') are truly in the driving seat of our culture; and a lot of well-educated people have been weeping friendlessly in caves." She puts forth a simple sentence to exemplify the power of punctuation to inform meaning:

A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves is fascinating because Truss, an expert on the subject matter expounds on punctuation questions the reader (me) has recently encountered or wondered about daily for years. The second comma in "ham, eggs, and chips" for example, is called the Oxford Comma and even among scholars it is a matter of debate - so don't sweat it. Truss further proves adept, with her lively and humorous writing, at breathing life into a subject you might expect to find as interesting as the sole of my shoe.

She begins with a salute to the under-appreciated and oft-maligned apostrophe, likening the brave punctuation mark to "the martyrish old codger in Arthur Miller's The Crucible who requested 'more weight.'" Her lessons in the apostraphic arts and origins are simultaneously edifying and inciting as she calls sticklers everywhere to free the poor apostrophe from the bonds of illiteracy.

Truss goes on to explore the history of the "contentious comma" and of punctuation in general. We learn that the earliest form of punctuation is credited to the Greek comic poet, Aristophanes, who had created a system of notation which advised actors when to breathe during a dramatic performance.

This may be as surprising to you as it was to me. I had just assumed that punctuation as we know it had always existed, never guessing that it had undergone an evolutionary process of its own. It never had occurred to me to consider the origins of punctuation before reading Ms. Truss's (The apostrophe is correct here. Read the book!) book.

This sort of discovery is half the fun. The other half is Lynne Truss's playful approach to illuminating the nature of punctuation, as in the following bit on paired commas:

As with other paired bracketing devices (such as parentheses, dashes and quotation marks), there is actual mental cruelty involved, incidentally, in opening up a pair of commas and then neglecting to deliver the closing one. The reader hears the first shoe drop and then strains in agony to hear the second. In dramatic terms, it's like putting a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I and then having the heroine drown herself quietly offstage in a bath during the interval.

In an effort to quell comma misuse, Lynne Truss puts forth her big comma rule, "don't use commas like a stupid person," for which she gives a few examples:

1. Leonara walked on her head, a little higher than usual.
2. The driver managed to escape from the vehicle before it sank and swam to the river-bank.
3. Don't guess, use a timer or watch.
4. The convict said the judge is mad.

Ms. Truss is the kind of person that is truly irritated by glaringly moronic use of punctuation, and while I cringed slightly at her pretentious misuse and abuse of her semi-literate teenage American pen-pal, I can identify with the bamboo-under-the-fingernails effect that truly ignorant punctuation can have on a person.

I am specifically recalling a sign in a convenient store window that I passed en route to work for years. It said No Public "Restrooms," hinting perhaps that "Restrooms" may not mean exactly what one supposes it does (nudge nudge, wink wink), or that "Restrooms" was a word the sign-maker had once heard used to refer to the object not intended for public use, and he had decided to employ that word in this sign despite a certain lack of understanding as to its meaning.