Book review by Maryna Fraser. Reproduced from PEGboard, August 2004.
Lynne Truss, the author of this witty and informative book, gives the reader permission to love punctuation, even if he cannot punctuate his way out of a paper bag.
While other girls were out with their boyfriends on Sunday afternoons getting their necks disfigured with love bites, she was at home with her wireless listening to a quiz programme called Many a Slip, in which erudite and amusing contestants spotted grammatical errors in pieces of prose. Truss's Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation proves that those afternoons were well spent. Even the catchy main title of this book is about the conduct of a panda in a café who objected to the entry under "Panda" in a badly punctuated wildlife manual.
Her approach to the subject is quirky and entertaining and she admits that a sign at the greengrocer for potato's and the advertisement on a passing bus for the film Two weeks notice drove her to distraction. Truss's book is not about grammar, but a rallying cry to the sticklers (the berks) to unite against the wankers. "The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning. Punctuation herds words together, keeps others apart. Punctuation directs you to read, like the musical notation directs a musician how to play."
She illustrates the use of punctuation with many literary anecdotes and examples, including the classic case of the ambiguity in the telegram that precipitated the Jameson Raid fiasco in 1896.
This book will delight people who get upset by incorrect punctuation, which Truss calls having a seventh sense. It deals with all the punctuation terms in the English language, which were derived mainly from Latin and Greek, starting with the apostrophe and moving on to the comma, colon, semi-colon, dash, question mark - which unbent itself and straightened up to become an exclamation - hyphen, brackets, ellipses and quotation marks. The comma is a "kind of scary grammatical sheepdog" and colons are of the "Yes" and "Ah" types, while the semi-colon is the Special Policeman in the event of comma fights. Dashes are about expression - attention-seeking punctuation.
Truss's aim is to keep meaningful distinctions alive in the English language. She does not advocate that language should remain static and she lists numerous examples where punctuation has been eliminated without affecting the meaning, such as addresses on envelopes.
In the final chapter she reveals technology (e-mail and SMSs) as the culprit mainly responsible for revolutionising punctuation, which was a printer's convention designed to make sense of the written word. She dedicates her 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 there- by directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution.
This zero-tolerance guide is an amusing and useful aid to the writing of plain English.
[Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Lynn Truss. 2003. Profile Books: Great Britain. Hard cover, approx. 12,5 cm x 19,5 cm, 209 pages, ISBN 1 86197 612 7. Price: R153.]