Eats shoots and leaves
Lynn Truss’s guide to punctuation is unappetising fare, even for pandas.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves purports to be a witty guide to the correct use of English punctuation which also strikes a blow for ‘sticklers’ against the prevailing culture of ignorance and indifference. Sadly, what could have been a pithy and amusing Strunk & White of punctuation is swollen by its author’s dotty schoolmarm act into a 200-page rant that exemplifies the vices it affects to make light of, and displays woeful ignorance and stupidity in every field but that of punctuation, not to mention much unpleasant prejudice.
Suffused with the pedant’s impression in every age that standards are in decline, fond memories of her “manual typewriter in the 1970s” (page 135) contrasting with today’s “bloody electronic signal” (page 190, followed a few pages later by an evisceration of (text) emoticons); she yet admits that things have never been perfect: on page 39, she quotes the Oxford Companion to English Literature: “There never was a golden age in which the rules…were…known, understood and followed by most educated people”. This have-and-eat approach to cake pervades the book.
Even where she sticks strictly to her subject, she is often unauthoritative: her seventh use of the apostrophe (page 45) is to indicate the plural of letters, but she fails to mention that this practice is not universal, as I was taught at school, and rediscovered when translating a book for Cambridge University Press. She is also inconsistent, on page 50 listing the mail-order firm Lands’ End as an offender in their punctuation of their name (under “Plural possessive instead of singular possessive”), but on page 57 excusing St Thomas’ Hospital on the reasonable grounds that “institutions, towns, colleges, families, companies and brands have authority over their own spelling and punctuation”.
Her bad taste ranges from the lazily stereotypical (“greengrocers are self-evidently horny-thumbed people who do not live by words”) through the casually bigoted (page 16, “Around this time, when other girls of my age were attending the Isle of Wight Festival and having abortions…”; describing dialect on page 44 as “strange, non-standard English” and on page 39 referring to “the regrettable result of making people sound…a bit from the West Country”), to the offensive: on page 186 she quotes Bernard Shaw’s letter to The Times in 1945 complaining about the waste caused by not spelling ‘bomb’ without the final ‘b’ and says “GBS can be a pretty stark reminder of how far one may lose one’s sense of proportion when obsessed by matters of language.” She has obviously forgotten that on pages 4–5 she wrote “[sticklers] got very worked up after 9/11 not because of Osama bin-Laden but because people on the radio kept saying ‘enormity’ when they meant ‘magnitude’”—a distinction without a difference, in any case; ‘enormity’ can mean ‘magnitude’.
Using Kingsley Amis’s taxonomy (page 30), she’s an intellectual berk and a syntactic wanker.
One more thing: in Truss’s version (back cover), the panda “fires two shots in the air”. That smacks of bowdlerization, and it’s not funny. In the version I heard, he massacred everyone in the restaurant; it seems that Truss had a lucky escape.
18th August 2017
Last updated 2017/08/18