Eat, shoot, leave, Apuntes de Idioma Inglés

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GOTHAM BOOKS Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, Cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand Published by Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Originally published in Great Britain in 2003 by Profile Books, Ltd. First American Electronic Edition, April 2004 Copyright © 2003 by Lynne Truss Foreword copyright © 2004 by Frank McCourt All rights reserved Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. MSR ISBN: 0-7865-4632- AEB ISBN: 0-7865-4633- Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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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

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C o n t e n t s

Foreword by Frank McCourt xi Publisher’s Note xv Preface xvii

Introduction – The Seventh Sense 1 The Tractable Apostrophe 35 That’ll Do, Comma 68 Airs and Graces 103 Cutting a Dash 132 A Little Used Punctuation Mark 168 Merely Conventional Signs 177

Bibliography 205

sort out my commas and save me from embarrass- ment. I thank them very much. Where faults obsti- nately remain, they are mine alone. Finally, I would like to thank Andrew Franklin for his encouraging involvement along the way, and the hundreds of readers who generously responded to articles in The Daily Telegraph , The Author and Writers’ News. It was very good to know that I was not alone.

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F o r e w o r d

If Lynne Truss were Catholic I’d nominate her for sainthood. As it is, thousands of English teachers from Maine to Maui will be calling down blessings on her merry, learned head for the gift of her book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves. It’s a book about punctuation. Punctuation, if you don’t mind! (I hesitated over that exclamation mark, and it’s all her doing.) The book is so spirited, so scholarly, those English teachers will sweep all other topics aside to get to, you guessed it, punctuation. Parents and children will gather by the fire many an evening to read passages on the history of the semi- colon and the terrible things being done to the apos- trophe. Once the poor stepchild of grammar (is that comma OK here?), punctuation will emerge as the Cinderella of the English language.

feel no such sympathy for the manager of my local supermarket who must have a cellarful of apostro- phes he doesn’t know what to do with: “Egg’s, $1. a doz.,” for heaven’s sake! (In the U.S. it’s “heaven’s sakes.”) Egg’s, and it’s not even a possessive. Lynne Truss has a great soul and I wouldn’t mind drinking tea out of a saucer with her—when you read the book you’ll see what I mean—except that, on occasion, she lets her Inner Stickler get out of hand. She tells us of “a shopkeeper in Bristol who deliberately stuck ungrammatical signs in his window as a ruse to draw people into the shop; they would come to complain, and he would then talk them into buying something.” Then she flings down the gauntlet: “... he would be ill-advised to repeat this ploy once my punctua- tion vigilantes are on the loose.” (Notice my mas- terly use of the ellipsis. Hold your admiration. I owe it all to Lynne.) I would have that Bristol shopkeeper knighted. Imagine the conversations in his shop. Irate cus- tomers skewering him on points of grammar. You could write a play, a movie on this shopkeeper. Track

• xiii •

Foreword

him down, Lynne. Bring him to London. Present him at court. On second thought, present Lynne Truss at court. The Queen needs cheering up, and what better way than to wax sexy with Ms. Truss over Aldus Manutius, the Elder and the Younger, their italics, their proto-semicolon. O, to be an English teacher in the Age of Truss.

—Frank McCourt January 2004

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eats, shoots & leaves

• xvii •

P r e f a c e

To be clear from the beginning: no one involved in the production of Eats, Shoots & Leaves expected the words “runaway” and “bestseller” would ever be associated with it, let alone upon the cover of an American edition. Had the Spirit of Christmas Best- sellers Yet to Come knocked at the rather modest front door of my small London publisher in the summer of 2003 and said, “I see hundreds of thou- sands of copies of your little book about punctua- tion sold before Christmas. It will be debated in every national newspaper and mentioned, yea, even in the House of Lords, where a woman named Lady Strange—I kid thee not—will actually tell the panda joke,” I’m afraid the Spirit would have been sent whiffling off down Clerkenwell Road with the sound of merry, disbelieving laughter ringing in its

whole comic novel about Lewis Carroll and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and expected other people to be interested. Oh yes, I have learned that lesson the hard way. I still have no idea whether sticklers are uniting in the UK, but I somehow doubt it, despite the stag- gering sales. Grammatical sticklers are the worst people for finding common cause because it is in their nature (obviously) to pick holes in everyone, even their best friends. Honestly, what an annoying bunch of people. One supporter of Eats, Shoots & Leaves wrote a 1,400-word column in The Times of London explaining (with glorious self-importance) that while his admiration for my purpose was “total”, he disagreed with virtually everything I said. So I am not sure my stickler-chums are, as I write this, sitting down to get things sorted out. What did become depressingly clear, however, was that my personal hunches about the state of the language were horribly correct: standards of punctuation in general in the UK are indeed approaching the point of illiteracy; self-justified philistines (“Get a life!”) are truly in the driving seat of our culture; and a lot of well-educated sensitive people really have been

• xix •

Preface

weeping friendlessly in caves for the past few years, praying for someone—anyone—to write a book about punctuation with a panda on the cover. I don’t know how bad things are in America, but in the UK I cannot emphasise it enough: standards of punctuation are abysmal. Encouraged to conduct easy tests on television, I discovered to my horror that most British people truly do not know their apostrophe from their elbow. “I’m an Oxbridge intellectual,” slurred a chap in Brighton, where we were asking passers-by to “pin the apostrophe on the sentence” for a harmless afternoon chat-show. He immediately placed an apostrophe (oh no!) in a possessive “its”. The high-profile editor of a national newspaper made the same mistake on a morning show, scoring two correct points out of a possible seven. On a TV news bulletin, the results of a vox pop item were shown on screen under the heading “Grammer Test”—the spelling of which I assumed was a joke until I realised nobody in the studio was laughing. Meanwhile well-wishers sent hundreds of delightful/horrific examples of idiotic sign-writing, my current favourite being the roadside warning CHILDREN DRIVE SLOWLY —courtesy of the wonderful

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