EATS, SHOOTS AND LEAVES, by Lynne Truss
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April 8, 2004, Thursday
Hark, Abused Punctuation: This Writer Feels Your
Pain
EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES
The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
By Lynne Truss
209 pages. Gotham Books. $17.50.
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In her scrappy treatise on punctuation and its discontents, Lynne Truss mentions that a certain kind of comma should be treated as half of a pair, ''even if you can only see one of them.'' However inadvertently, that phrase bolsters her book's main claim: that we are far too forgiving of imprecise language and should be more vigilant. After all, Ms. Truss is a self-appointed grammar fiend whose book-jacket photograph shows her defacing a poster for the film ''Two Weeks Notice'' to avenge its lack of an apostrophe. And she recommends a gun as well as ''strong medication for personality disorder'' to anyone who shares her zeal for ferreting out mistakes. Misplaced modifier alert: what she means above is that you can see only one of the two commas. What she says, but does not mean, is that you can see the comma but not hear, feel or smell it. This is worth emphasizing because it demonstrates just how contagious Ms. Truss's witty analysis and fussbudget tactics prove to be. And by the way, she would argue about whether Ms. Truss's or Ms. Truss' is the correct possessive form of her name. |
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''Eats, Shoots & Leaves'' takes its title from a mispunctuated phrase about a panda. In Britain, where this rib-tickling little book has been a huge success and its panda joke apparently recited in the House of Lords, Ms. Truss has proved to be anything but a lone voice. Despite her assertion that ''being burned as a witch is not safely enough off the agenda'' for the punctuation-minded stickler, Ms. Truss obviously hit a raw nerve. For those who are tired of seeing signs like ''Bobs' Motors'' and think an ''Eight Items or Less'' checkout sign should read ''Eight Items or Fewer,'' boy, is this book for you.
Ms. Truss has not succeeded solely on the basis of her punctuation acumen (though that is considerable -- and by the way, she finds dashes and parentheses annoying). Her mission to ''engage in some direct-action argy-bargy'' has helped the book, too.
In her ardor for grammatical correctness and her clear, entertaining ways of arguing and illustrating, Ms. Truss has prompted an almost inexplicable fervor. As a former schoolteacher, the author Frank McCourt (who wrote the foreword to this edition) suggests nominating her for sainthood. And for reasons best known to himself, James Lipton, identified here as the host of ''Inside the Actors Studio'' (no apostrophe!), has been moved, in blurb mode, to declare: ''Punc-rock on!''
Why are there five commas, two exclamation points and a colon in that sentence? Ms. Truss has a high old time investigating such matters. She even ascribes personalities to the marks themselves and cites George Bernard Shaw's reference to apostrophes as ''uncouth bacilli.'' Thus the exclamation point becomes ''the equivalent of canned laughter.'' And colons divide into the ''Yes!'' and ''Ah'' varieties. And as for the hypnotic power of the semicolon: ''I adopt a kind of stream-of-consciousness sentence structure; somewhat like Virginia Woolf; without full sentences; but it feels O.K. to do this; rather worrying.''
Beneath the book's abundant playfulness are a brief but serious look at grammar's history and some prognostications about it's future. (An apostrophe in ''it's,'' thus misused, is one of the errors most likely to drive Ms. Truss to violence.) She goes all the way back to Aristophanes to identify the comma as a signal for actors' phrasing. When it comes to Shakespeare, she has heard of someone playing Duncan in ''Macbeth'' and reading the line ''Go, get him surgeons'' as ''Go get him, surgeons!''
And she notes that punctuation has always been valued and sustained by printers. ''The bad news for punctuation, however,'' she writes, ''is that the age of printing is due to hold its official retirement party next Friday afternoon at half-past five.''
Now what? Well, Ms. Truss disputes the idea that the written word is passing out of vogue. If anything, we do more writing than ever, thanks to e-mail. But she regards much of this as not writing, and not even typing -- just sending. The dash -- that all-purpose way of stringing random thoughts together -- sometimes to incoherent effect -- may be widely used ''because it is, simply, easy to see.'' If that explains its popularity now, why did it also hold such great appeal for Emily Dickinson? Perhaps because, in a critical observation that Ms. Truss cites, it symbolizes ''the analogical leaps and flashes of advanced cognition.''
On the other hand, Dickinson may have ''used a typewriter from which all the other punctuation keys had been sadistically removed.''
The cleverness of Ms. Truss (no apostrophe needed) does have its cute side. She mentions the writer who ''lapses into a comma (ho ho)'' and people ''who don't know their apostrophe from their elbow.'' But the passion and fun of her arguments are wonderfully clear. Here is someone with abiding faith in the idea that ''proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.''
In offering guidelines on how to take these matters seriously, Ms. Truss points out that ''there is even a rather delightful publication for children called The Punctuation Repair Kit, which takes the line 'Hey! It's uncool to be stupid!' -- which is a lie, of course, but you have to admire them for trying.'' This book makes correct usage so cool that you have to admire Ms. Truss for the same reason.
Published: 04 - 08 - 2004, Late Edition - Final, Section E, Column 3, Page 9
The New Zealand Herald
Lynne Truss:
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
28.11.2003 Reviewed by PHILIP HENSHER
LONDON - The surprise best-seller of the year is Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves, billed as "The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation".
Nobody involved, it's fair to say, could have predicted even so funny and good-humoured a book on this subject taking off to this extent; the initial printing sold out so rapidly that the publisher was taken by surprise, and by now there are in excess of 100,000 copies in print, within a couple of weeks of publication.
It is a real phenomenon.
Miss Truss notes Kingsley Amis's opinion that anyone writing about linguistic usage tends to strike one as either a "berk" or a "wanker": either someone who hasn't a clue that the so-called "greengrocer's apostrophe", as in "Tomato's, £1.50" is wrong, or someone obsessive about arid points of etymology and firing off letters whenever a journalist uses "decimate" incorrectly.
I am a bit tougher than Miss Truss on some things - I can't believe she permits the apostrophe to indicate plurals in "too many but's and and's".
In other areas I am slacker - I don't see anything wrong in "author photograph" or in the double possessive, such as "John, who is a friend of the footballer's, said", which seems perfectly correct to me, as well as vivid and snappy in effect.
But on the whole she is a solid sort of stickler, guiding us through such tricky and abstruse questions as "the Oxford comma" and - one I never quite mastered - what the hell the colon is for anyway.
Why, however, has it been such an enormous success? Could anyone have thought that there was a large market for a discussion of whether you should write "sausage, chips and beans" as you do in London, or "sausage, chips, and beans," as, apparently, people do in Oxford? As she says, anyone who is interested in these matters will probably know all the useful information in this book already; anyone who actually needs the information won't be interested in buying it.
That ought to be true, but I doubt it is really the case.
There are a number of guides, such as HW Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage and Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage, which retain a steady popularity.
Those are reference books, and ones which are as enjoyable to disagree with as to learn from; I use, when I remember, Partridge, but relish it as much for its peculiar period flavour - something or other is dismissed as "a harmless vulgarism from the kitchen" - and its outdated judgements, such as the ruling that "quite" cannot mean "rather", as for any decisive authority.
After that, there are books like Miss Truss's, which lay down some strict rules in a looser way, and books like Kingsley Amis's very entertaining The King's English, inspired, apparently, by his irritation at seeing perfectly good words misused, or taking on a previously unknown meaning.
I know the feeling, and have long given up hope of ever again seeing the words "jejune", "coruscating", "oblivious" or "pristine" used in what I think of, no doubt indefensibly, their proper meaning.
Miss Truss writes about the loneliness of the stickler, forever wincing at misplaced apostrophes when no one else seems to care; the brisk sales of her book prove her, happily, wrong, and I look forward to finding out that anyone else in the world apart from me shudders when they read the sentence "the newly painted wall was completely pristine."
The striking thing is that such books, if, like Eats, Shoots and Leaves, they are good, always sell very well.
This is remarkable at a time when, for decades, no one in schools has been taught grammar or punctuation in a formal way, and we've been told that such rules are arbitrary and not very important.
If these books are not being bought entirely by readers who want their knowledge confirmed, then they are selling to people who don't accept the argument that the casual English of the untutored is quite good enough.
They want to improve, to learn, and know that their education wasn't good enough.
As it happens, I have a lot of sympathy for the view of educational practice as an intellectual proposition.
In theory, I know perfectly well that words change their meaning, for instance, through small mistakes, and after some time, when someone writes "all the critics gave X's performance coruscating reviews" it will not be an error for "excoriating" at all, but simply what the word means now.
All the same, you won't catch many good writers using "coruscating" in this sense for a long time; when they do, they will have been preceded by a vast army of pioneering berks.
And to become a good writer, to use language in a way unlikely to cause contempt in your readers, it is necessary to become acquainted with the sort of rules which you might subsequently reject.
If you know what "oblivious" actually means, you still might choose to write "she was oblivious of the murderer creeping up behind her" on the grounds that no one much cares any more.
But that's entirely different from writing "I gave the dog it's dinner" because you haven't a clue, even though in the end the two mistakes are probably about as important as each other.
The striking thing about the popularity of such books is that there is a hunger for knowledge, for factual correctness, which education is no longer fulfilling.
A parallel instance might be geographical knowledge.
An atlas is not a lot of use as a map, if you are actually travelling; nor does it really represent the sort of knowledge that a geographer would primarily be interested in.
And yet atlases sell, because they contain solid, undeniable, facts of the sort that are no longer conveyed in a modern education.
The hunger for facts, for knowledge, for correctness is an interesting phenomenon, and perhaps rather an English one.
There are few places in the world, I expect, where the pub quiz is so popular a pastime, or where some of the longest-running programmes are general knowledge quizzes with derisory prizes.
Such things have an indirect relationship with education as we understand it now; the snippets of information are not exactly useful; it is more like a national appreciation of knowledge as spectacle.
The evident hunger of rational adults for information, for general knowledge, even of a slightly naive nature, and for assurances of correctness about such things as linguistic usage has gone largely unassuaged by education in recent years.
The sort of systematic teaching of punctuation represented by Miss Truss's book is now quite rare, and first-year undergraduates, even those studying English, regularly get whose and who's, it's and its, even your and you're confused.
It is a great shock, no doubt, when people complete an education driven by the conviction that old-fashioned correctness does not ultimately matter that much, only to discover that the outside world is about to judge them by exactly those old-fashioned standards.
No wonder there is a market for books like this, which have no time for the argument that standards are relative and correctness a delusion.
We can go on assuring each other, from our elevated standpoint, that the mere existence of the possessive apostrophe in English is an absurd invention, that the proscription of the split infinitive was made up by 18th-century grammarians who didn't understand that English wasn't Latin, and that when most people come to think "oblivious" means "unaware", that is what it means.
But the market has decided otherwise.
It's noticeable, too, that the first people to denounce such notions of correctness are the last ones ever to sin against them.
Last update: March 25, 2004 at 9:50 PM
Stephen Wilbers
March 26, 2004
I appreciate people who are committed to the correct use of language, but I have little patience for sticklers who write books carrying on about how awful other people's writing is, the civilization-is-going-to-heck-in-a-handbasket approach to emphasizing the importance of careful writing.
Granted, there's a lot of awful writing out there -- I'm sure I've done my share, and perhaps you have, too -- but ranting strikes me as unproductive.
Either it makes people feel inadequate, or it makes them feel smug, and neither reaction seems helpful to me. It also suggests that avoiding errors is easy when in fact it requires serious effort.
I can, however, be won over by a stickler who writes with wit and charm, and Lynne Truss won me over with her book, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves."
It wasn't just that Truss based her title on a joke about a panda (as told on the back cover) that "walks into a café ... orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots into the air." When the waiter asks why, the panda throws down "a badly punctuated wildlife manual" containing this entry: "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
If you're a sucker for jokes about unnecessary commas, as I am, a book by this title is hard to resist.
Still, I had to get past the subtitle, "The zero tolerance approach to punctuation," which made me think, oh, boy, here we go again.
My suspicion was confirmed in the first chapter when I read, "Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. ... If you still persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best,' you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave."
Well, at least she is a spirited ranter.
I wasn't won over until the next chapter, when Truss rhapsodized over 15th century Aldus Manutius the Elder, whom she declared a hero "among historians of the printed word" for his innovations in punctuation, which included inventing the italic typeface and printing the first semicolon. And then she wrote:
"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."
All right, I admitted, this is fun.
And I had more fun when Truss concluded her roundup of comma rules with "the big final rule" for the comma: "Don't use commas like a stupid person."
Urging the reader to use "intelligent discretion" and to be "simply alert to potential ambiguity," Truss cited these examples of "stupid person" errors: "Leonora walked on her head, a little higher than usual" and "Don't guess, use a timer or watch."
Lest I leave you with the impression that sticklers are above committing the occasional error, I should point out that in her final chapter Truss dangled a modifier: "Having said all this, there is no immediate cause for panic."
And now I can be accused of sticking it to the stickler.
BookPage
Waging war on sloppy punctuation
REVIEW BY LYNN GREEN
British author Lynne Truss is a self-described "stickler," a nut about punctuation who can't rest easy when she sees mistakes on street signs, newspaper headlines or billboards. ("Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger," she says upon spotting a misplaced apostrophe.) As a punctuation perfectionist, Truss considers herself part of a rare breed, and she expected her book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, to interest only a tiny segment of the British population when it was first published in the U.K. last year. However, to the surprise of the author, her publisher and just about everyone else in Britain, the book became a number-one bestseller, even topping sales of John Grisham's latest legal thriller.
Will the book have the same appeal for American readers? We'll find out on April 12, when Gotham Books releases the North American edition of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Editors at Gotham, who might have been afraid to wade into the copyediting waters with an opinionated author like Truss, wisely decided to reprint the book exactly as it was in the original version, with all its British spellings and punctuation intact. Some of the references might well be confusing to American readers—she refers to a period as a "full stop," for example—but Truss manages to get her point across nonetheless.
Proper punctuation, she argues, is similar to good manners, a system for making your intentions clear. Truss fusses about people who insist on adding apostrophes to plurals (DVD's), who use the wrong possessive for "it" (its'), and who put commas in many, many places where they don't belong. Her most hilarious example of the latter is replicated in the book's title, a reference to a wildlife manual with poor punctuation that unintentionally turned a panda into a gun-wielding restaurant diner (you'll have to read the book for the full joke).
Funny and self-deprecating but always serious about her mission, Truss is a stern commander in the war on careless writing. Weary editors, schoolteachers and fellow sticklers everywhere will wish her victory in this much-needed battle.
from the April 06, 2004 edition
EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES:
THE ZERO TOLERANCE APPROACH TO PUNCTUATION
By Lynne Truss
Gotham Books
209 pp., $17.50
Don't lapse into a comma
A piqued grammarian insists, 'You can learn to punctuate correctly!'
By Ruth Walker
Don't let the hard-nosed tone of her subtitle put you off: "The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation." Lynne Truss has done the English-speaking world a huge service. In one tidy little volume that a reasonably swift reader can zip through in the time it takes for an in-flight movie - but with far more laughs - she has wittily and concisely presented the rules of English punctuation.
The title derives from a joke about a badly punctuated wildlife manual that said the giant panda "eats, shoots & leaves," (verb, verb, and verb) instead of "eats shoots and leaves" (verb, noun, and noun). The book has been a surprise No. 1 bestseller in Britain with more than 800,000 copies in print.
“Zero tolerance" is Truss's approach not to any particular punctuation issue but to the whole notion that mastery of the basics is beyond the ken of ordinary people. "If I did not believe that everyone is capable of understanding where an apostrophe goes," she writes, "I would not be writing this book."
As one who once applied a red felt tip to a restaurant menu offering a baked "potatoe" (several years before Dan Quayle burst onto the national scene), I can identify with the guerrilla approach she recommends, especially in the fight against "apostrophe abuse." She even lists "the weapons required in the apostrophe war (stop when you start to feel uncomfortable): correction fluid, big pens, stickers cut in a variety of sizes, both plain (for sticking over unwanted apostrophes) and coloured (for inserting where apostrophes are needed), tin of paint with big brush, guerrilla style clothing...."
But seriously, the meat of the book is a series of chapters on individual marks, starting with the "tractable apostrophe." If I could get everyone in North America to read one chapter, it would be this one. That poor little flying comma gets stuck, willy-nilly, into all sorts of situations where it's neither wanted nor needed, and then left out of places where it is called for.
If the apostrophe is the most abused bit of punctuation among the general population, the comma is likely to cause more grief among professional wordsmiths. It began, Truss explains, as a sort of performance direction, a tick on a manuscript to suggest a pause or a phrase break to those who would read the text aloud. But somewhere along the line, the comma became an indicator of syntax. An introductory clause gets a comma, but not so an introductory phrase, for instance.
When an editor and a writer arm-wrestle over a comma that one wants in and the other wants out, they are generally reprising the traditional struggle over these two views, Truss says. One of the comma heavyweight championship bouts of the 20th century played out between Harold Ross, the legendary editor of The New Yorker, and the equally legendary humorist James Thurber. Ross was a pro-comma kind of guy. Thurber was of the less-is-more school, but since Ross was the editor, he generally had the last word. Thurber was asked by a correspondent why he used a comma in the sentence, "After dinner, the men went into the living-room." Truss writes, "His answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. 'This particular comma,' Thurber explained, 'was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.' "
"Eats, Shoots & Leaves" includes a publisher's note explaining that the American edition is a reprint, complete with original spelling and punctuation, of the British edition. That turns out to matter less than one might expect. Which rules are followed is less important than having a set of rules in the first place. Those who use the serial comma (the one after "white" in the phrase "red, white, and blue") have more in common with those who don't than with those who don't even know what the serial comma is.
Language is the richest, most adaptable instrument that human beings have to transcend the isolation of individual consciousness and share knowledge, experience, and feelings with one another. A book like this can help language do that important work better.
• Ruth Walker is the Monitor's chief copy editor. To read her grammar blog, log on to http://weblogs.csmonitor.com/verbal_energy/
Even in the knowledge that our punctuation has arrived at its present state by a series of accidents; even in the knowledge that there are at least seventeen rules for the comma, some of which are beyond explanation by top grammarians - it is a matter for despair to see punctuation chucked out as worthless by people who don't know the difference between who's and whose, and whose bloody automatic "grammar checker" can't tell the difference either. And despair was the initial impetus for this book. I saw a sign for "Book's" with an apostrophe in it, and something deep inside me snapped; snapped with that melancholy sound you hear in Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard," like a far-off cable breaking in a mine-shaft. I know that language moves on. It has to. Not once have I ever stopped to feel sorry for those Egyptian hieroglyph artists tossed on the scrapheap during a former linguistic transition ("Birds' heads in profile, mate? You having a laugh?"). But I can't help feeling that our punctuation system, which has served the written word with grace and ingenuity for centuries, must not be allowed to disappear without a fight.
- from "Eats, Shoots & Leaves"
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What is this thing called, love?
By GALE ZOË GARNETT
Saturday, Apr. 17, 2004
Eats, Shoots & Leaves:
The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
By Lynne Truss
Gotham Books, 209 pages, $26
On Dec. 2, 2003, I was scrunch-compacted into a seat in Air Canada's economy class (World traveller. Indeed), headed to London.
Reading the book section of The Guardian. I began to smile, and then, ever so softly, to laugh (something we white-knucklers rarely do while airborne). The merriment was induced by quotes from a positive review of a book called Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss. A book about ... punctuation.
A long-time collector of Linguistic Lit, I tore out the review and "filed" it in my copious handbag. Three days later, I stopped in London's Waterstone's, a bookshop large enough to carry something as specialized as a punctuational tome.
Oh," said the young shop assistant, "it's on a shelf behind the till, with the other bestsellers."
"Bestsellers? I think you've got the wrong book. Eats, Shoots & Leaves is a book about punctuation."
"Right. By Lynne Truss?"
"Yes." He gestured to a bank of cash registers, and there were the Truss books, prominently displayed over a sign reading "Bestsellers."
Eats, Shoots & Leaves did indeed turn out to be the surprise bestseller of the 2003 Christmas season. It has continued to sell briskly, recently winning Book of the Year prize at the British Book Awards.
Truss's triumph does have popularity precedents. In 1983, Karen Elizabeth Gordon had great success with The Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed.
Her second book, The Transitive Vampire tended to be too cute by half, and seemed squeezed forth due to the deserved success of the first (at least to this reviewer, who reviewed both books). And in 1975, An Almanac of Words at Play by Willard R. Espy enjoyed great favour with the wordbook brigades. Espy's second effort, O, Thou Improper, Thou Uncommon Noun is useful, but lacks the vibrant freshness of the first book.
I do not know if the earlier books won prizes. Prizes are odd things in any event, contesting works almost always being "apples-and-oranges." That said, the prize-garnering Eats, Shoot & Leaves is visually vivid, funny, informative (and/or corroborative), and a worthy addition to any logophile's library.
Visually vivid: "A Panda walked into a café. He ordered a sandwich, ate it, then pulled out a gun and shot the waiter. 'Why?' groaned the injured man.
"The Panda shrugged, tossed him a badly punctuated wildlife manual and walked out. And sure enough, when the waiter consulted the book, he found an explanation. 'Panda,' read the entry for his assailant. 'Large black and white native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'..."
Funny (examples of mispunctuation, involving commas): "Go get him, surgeons!" (an actor's misreading of Duncan's line in Macbeth).
"What is this thing called, love?"
"No dogs please" (Here, Truss points out that "many dogs do please; as a matter of fact, they rather make a point of it.")
Some of the instructive humour comes from alternatives, e.g.: "A woman, without her man, is nothing." Or: "A woman: without her, man is nothing"
Informative: Eats, Shoots & Leaves is informative throughout, both in confirming those punctuation points one already knew and correcting long-held mistaken notions.
Truss began her career as a literary editor, has been a novelist and a critic, and now appears regularly in print in The Sunday Times, and out loud on BBC Radio, discussing language. She instructs in a way that, while laced with humour, has as its bedrock the indignant determination of a self-confessed "stickler," who has been known to splutter at buses bearing poorly punctuated signage.
"To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as 'Thank God its Friday' [without the apostrophe] rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence" ......... "Two weeks notice. ......... Where was the apostrophe? Surely there should be an apostrophe ......... if it were 'one week's notice [or] one month's notice there would be an apostrophe. ......... Therefore 'two weeks' notice requires an apostrophe!"
Truss also addresses one of my perpetual editorial debates: What do you do when a proper name ends in "s"? A name such as ......... er, "Truss." Fowler now says one must add an apostrophe and a second "s" for Truss, but not for names from the ancient world (e.g. Achilles'). Happily, one need not add "es." This is good, as neither Lynne Truss nor anyone else (with the possible exception of Goons and Pythons) wants to go all giggly re "Trusses."
Elsewhere, Truss bemoans the reduced, if not virtually vanished, proper teaching of grammar in Britain's lower school grades, producing baskets of unpunctuated words, open to multiple interpretation. Truss knows she fusses, reminding one of Kingsley Amis's The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage (recently reissued by HarperCollins), in which Amis differentiates "berks" and "wankers" in the following fashion: Berks ......... don't care enough about the language ......... Wankers ......... care too much.
By that measurement, Lynn Truss is a wanker. As am I. As was Kingsley Amis.
Wankers of the world, unite! You have rather a lot of delightfully delineated information to gain from reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves, as thousands of Britons have already discovered.
Gale Zoë Garnett is a Canadian writer, actor and wordbook collector. Her most recent novel is Transient Dancing. Her current favourite wordbook is The History of Linguistics in the Nordic Countries.
By EDMUND MORRIS
EATS,
SHOOTS & LEAVES
The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.
By Lynne Truss. 209 pp. New York: Gotham Books. $17.50.
A MANHATTAN real estate broker has just notified me, on heavy stationery, that ''the New York market is remaining vibrant with the goal of buying a home being a principle interest for purchaser's to either upscale or downscale their homes.''
Syntactical incoherence aside, it is difficult to say what is most annoying about this sentence: the dropped comma, the misspelled adjective, the superfluous apostrophe, the split infinitive, the grating use (twice) of ''home'' as a commercial noun. I am tempted to reply, ''It is against my principal's to consider such illiterate letter's,'' but doubt that the sarcasm would register. As the journalist Lynne Truss notes in ''Eats, Shoots & Leaves,'' her forcedly jovial punctuation primer, ''the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler.''
The success of Truss's book in Britain, however, suggests that the world -- at least, that small part of it floating north of France and west of Norway -- does indeed care about proper punctuation. ''Eats, Shoots & Leaves'' (the title derives from a joke about a sloppily edited natural history of the panda) hit the top of the British best-seller list last winter, and nobody was more surprised than the author. Now it is being rushed into print here, in the hope that we will find it as amusing, and salutary, as our trans-Atlantic cousins do.
Salutary it may be, in its call for more concern about how we express ourselves, orthographically speaking. But as anyone knows who has watched a roomful of Brits cracking up at the word ''knickers,'' national humor is a perishable export. Truss's tone is so relentlessly larky, and her imagery so parochial, that American readers will find much of this book incomprehensible, let alone unfunny:
''Well, if punctuation is the stitching of language, language comes apart, obviously, and all the buttons fall off. If punctuation provides the traffic signals, words bang into each other and everyone ends up in Minehead. If one can bear for a moment to think of punctuation marks as those invisibly beneficent fairies (I'm sorry), our poor deprived language goes parched and pillowless to bed. And if you take the courtesy analogy, a sentence no longer holds the door open for you to walk in, but drops it in your face as you approach.''
I'm sorry about the fairies, too, but I'm sorrier about her prose style, which is cloying even if you know where Minehead is, and have a stomach for mixed metaphor. Truss admits, ''I am not a grammarian,'' and offers plenty of proof -- as in ''each other'' above. She's no syntactician either, never quite knowing where to put the qualifier ''only.'' And she resorts so often to Brit-speak adverbs, such as ''obviously,'' ''basically'' and ''actually,'' that whole stretches of the book read like voice mail. Her American editors, by the way, might have done her the favor of rephrasing ''It's a real fag'' on Page 18, not to mention an unquotably racist joke on Page 51.
All this is a pity, because when she stops straining at lawks-a-mussy chirpiness and analyzes punctuation malpractice, she is often persuasive, as on the tendency of lazy writers to reticulate their sentences with dashes: ''The dash is less formal than the semicolon, which makes it more attractive; it enhances conversational tone; and . . . it is capable of quite subtle effects. The main reason people use it, however, is that they know you can't use it wrongly -- which, for a punctuation mark, is an uncommon virtue.''
Truss is a fan of the semicolon, which has caused more fistfights between authors and editors than any other cipher, with the possible exception of the dollar sign. Writers themselves are divided on its merits. Many follow the example of George Orwell, and try to do without it. Martin Amis has managed to reduce his per-novel ratio to one. Yet Amis's father, Kingsley, used semicolons to superb comic effect (vide the hangover scene in ''Lucky Jim''), and V. S. Naipaul drops them regularly, like tiny bombs of Alka-Seltzer, into his paragraphs of dyspeptic prose.
Truss concedes that the semicolon is ''dangerously habit-forming,'' but that is true of any mark that becomes a mannerism. Emily Dickinson used the dash in preference to any other punctuation. Henry James sometimes seemed to need commas for his commas. When George Bernard Shaw saw the manuscript of T. E. Lawrence's ''Seven Pillars of Wisdom,'' he submitted it to a polite form of colonic irrigation.
The greatest stylists -- those who ''hear'' as they write -- punctuate sparingly and subtly. Truss errs in saying that P. G. Wodehouse eschews the semicolon, but I can see why she thinks so. He uses it, on average, once a page, usually in a long sentence of mounting funniness, so that its luftpause, that tiny intake of breath, will puff the subsequent comma clauses along, until the last of them lands with thistledown grace. By then you're laughing so much, you're not even aware of the art behind the art.
Even ''incorrect'' punctuation, Truss admits, can enhance literary expression in the right hands. Evelyn Waugh cut commas to convey the clipped dispatch of upper-class speech: ''You see I wasn't so much asking you to agree to anything as explaining what our side propose to do.'' (Note, too, the pluralization of ''side,'' so cozily snobbish.) Indeed, there is hardly any shibboleth of style that can't be blasphemed against. Ban the comma splice, then along comes Beckett with his jagged, haunting arrhythmia. Mandate periods after every sentence, and Joyce will show you how to end a book with no stops whatever. Rail against the exclamation point, but don't expect Tom Wolfe to listen. Frown on the ellipsis, and A. G. Mojtabai will use it to express an old man's dementia in a way that clutches your heart.
To her credit, Truss is never pedantic, even as she castigates the greengrocer's apostrophe (''potato's,'' ''xma's trees,'' ''orange's''), which most of us find quaintly amusing. She's right to be irritated, though, by that ubiquitous mistake, the use of ''it's'' as a possessive pronoun. Her scholarship is impressive and never dry. I didn't know, for example, that ''dash'' derives from the Middle English dasshen, ''to break.'' But she's a few years off in ascribing the first use of direct-speech quotation marks to ''someone'' in 1714. Daniel Defoe splattered them all over his ''True Relation of the Apparition of One Mrs. Veal'' in 1706.
AT risk of sounding parochial myself, I wish that Truss had devoted a few pages to taking on the usage czars of American academe -- particularly those at the Modern Language Association and University of Chicago Press, whose anti-capital, anti-hyphen, anti-italic stylebooks seek to return modern logography to the uniformity of ancient papyri. Copy editors beholden to these manuals routinely insult the intelligence of writers (and readers) by applying punctuation formulas in contempt of sense.
It doesn't help even if your name is George Eliot. I just reread ''Middlemarch,'' alternating between old (1891) and new (Modern Library, 1992) editions, and was disconcerted by the latter's willingness to alter Eliot's original marks. For instance, Dorothea Brooke, in 1891, was ''troublesome -- to herself, chiefly.'' A hundred years later, that long, corrective dash is gone, and so is the comma emphasis. Qualification is now changed to consequence. This is not editing: it's rewriting.
We stateside scribes better look for a punctuation crusader more aggressive than Lynne Truss. Whichever presidential candidate wants to take on the M.L.A. this summer gets my vote. Meanwhile, I'm going to hyphenate as often as I want, in the privacy of my own, uh, home.
Edmund Morris is the author of ''Theodore Rex.'' He is writing a short biography of Beethoven.
By Mary Ambrose | April 18, 2004
Eats,
Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
By Lynne Truss
Gotham, 209 pp., $17.50
Lynne Truss has a winner in "Eats, Shoots and Leaves," and I don't say this simply because it has topped the bestseller lists in the United Kingdom for months and is the British publishing phenomenon of the year, or even because Frank McCourt says in the foreword to the US edition that Truss should be beatified for writing it. Really, none of that has swayed me. I believe that this book is a winner because it made me smile, it made me laugh, I learned things from it, and I enjoyed reading it. That it was all about punctuation makes it a hole in one.
The title says it all. "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" is from a punctuation joke. A panda goes into a cafe, has a sandwich, pulls out a pistol, shoots into the air, and then leaves. As he walks toward the exit a waiter asks him why he did it. The panda tosses him a badly punctuated wildlife manual and says, "I'm a panda. . . . Look it up." He does and finds: "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves." We all know people who would love that joke, and this book is for them. And it turns out they're buying it for everyone else.
Truss is a journalist, novelist, and scriptwriter, not a teacher, and it shows. As a narrator she doesn't have her finger wagging at you throughout. Rather, she's a companionable guide down an unfamiliar or unexamined trail. She discusses the plants, points out the flowers, tells you their Latin names, and puts you at greater ease in your writing and reading.
I admit that the information paralyzed me on occasion, like watching your feet on the pedals while riding a bike. However, I appreciate that my discomfort is guilt. (I clearly need to hyphenate a lot more words.) Anyone who loves books wants to be grammatically impeccable. So Truss can help if you're a little wobbly on your use of the colon: It " delivers the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words." Or you're not sure about the comma: It's used to separate modifying words "where the modifying words are all modifying the same thing to the same degree." So the phrase "a dark, stormy night" requires a comma. "Australian red wines" does not.
Any good grammar book can dictate rules, but you can't help but be seduced by Truss's passion. She argues that grammar is like good manners. (Something highly valued by the English. No wonder the book is so popular there; she is singing their tune.) She reminds us that it comes from the word "punctilious," meaning attentive to formality or etiquette. But there's more; "on the page, punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum the tune." And as the joke of the title suggests, the song can change entirely when the punctuation errs or differs.
One that's always rankled both Truss and me is the sign "No dogs please." Without the comma between "dogs" and "please" it becomes, as Truss puts it, "an indefensible generalization, since many dogs do please, as a matter of fact; they rather make a point of it."
Truss refers to the famous punctuation punch-ups between editor Harold Ross and writer James Thurber at The New Yorker magazine in the '30s and '40s. Thurber saw commas as "upturned office chairs unhelpfully hurled down the wide-open corridor of readability." Ross disagreed and sprinkled them through Thurber's work. When Thurber was asked why he had a comma in the sentence "After dinner, the men went into the living-room," Truss quotes him as saying, "This particular comma was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up."
And there are -- even Truss admits -- those who obsess about punctuation to the point of madness. George Bernard Shaw, a sensible man if you read his plays, wanted to reform English and during World War II wrote to The Times suggesting the second "b" in the word "bomb" was superfluous and 25 percent of a minute was wasted every time it was written. Gertrude Stein called the comma "servile," and Truss says, "Lawyers eschew it as a troublemaker."
Unfortunately Truss can't resist giving in to her own language obsession. In the last chapter she touches on subjects that chill my blood: The Future of Books, The Effect of Computers on Reading, and, of course, The Impact of Computer Use on the Future of Punctuation. (Conscious, erroneous use of capitals for emphasis.) They're topics we've discussed too often. They have no clear answers and are simply an opportunity for Truss to speculate on a topic she cares deeply about. In a book lovingly filled with facts and anecdotes, it doesn't work.
Yet like a joyful balloon, Truss can't stay down for long. She ends with good cheer and good facts. "I know that language moves on. It has to," she admits. "Not once have I ever stopped to feel sorry for those Egyptian hieroglyph artists tossed on the scrapheap during a former linguistic transition ('Birds' heads in profile, mate? You having a laugh?')." And did you know that Dudley Moore and his comic partner Peter Cook discussed the ellipsis? (The three dots . . .) This is what you learn from Truss.
This book changed my life in small, perfect ways, like learning how to make better coffee or fold an omelet. It's the perfect gift for anyone who cares about grammar and a gentle introduction for those who don't care enough.
Mary Ambrose is a Canadian writer who lives in London.
Sunday, April 25, 2004 - Page updated at 12:00 A.M.
Michael
Upchurch /
Seattle Times book critic
'Eats, Shoots & Leaves': Having fun with punctuation?
"Eats, Shoots
& Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation"
by Lynne Truss
Gotham, 209 pp., $17.50
Sometimes when I'm reading Paul Theroux I'll find myself fixating on his humorous use of exclamation points, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Or in a downcast mood, I'll wonder whatever became of the good, old comma-dash, with its glorious pause-spring rhythm: "Let love therefore be what it will, — my uncle Toby fell into it." (From Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy.")
In college, I used to write out passages from favorite authors, changing all the dashes and semicolons to commas, just to see what would happen. (Awful, just awful — like leaving the yeast out of an angel food cake.) And not so long ago, while transcribing a passage from Patrick O'Brian — a writer I hadn't had much interest in until then — I found myself staring at the words on the page and muttering, "Good grief, he punctuates beautifully."
If you've had similar reactions while reading, or if you've been appalled by some of the mispunctuation atrocities that litter our cultural landscape ("Come inside for CD's, VIDEO's, DVD's, and BOOK's"), then British writer Lynne Truss is here to let you know: There are more of us out there than anyone realizes!
Her book, "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation," was a bestseller in England, and it comes complete with a "rallying cry": "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)."
A cheery, chatty mini-tome, it offers numerous examples of the role that punctuation plays in enlivening and clarifying language. The joke from which it takes its title — about a single misplaced comma that changes a foliage-eating panda into a casual murderer who walks away from the scene — is just one of those examples.
Between jokes, Truss throws in some tidbits on punctuation history. Punctuation as we know it, she says, is a product of the age of printing. While commas, semicolons and other punctuation marks had their antecedents in the era of hand-copied manuscripts, it was Venetian printer Aldus Manutius (1450-1515) who started to standardize punctuation practices.
Punctuation styles, Truss acknowledges, have changed drastically over the last 500 years, but the basic vocabulary — comma, period, semicolon, etc. — has altered at a far more conservative pace. Lately, Truss argues, the advent of e-mail has brought with it a rapid decline in people's punctuation habits. Will hasty cyber-communication by semi-literate keyboard correspondents be the death of the semicolon?
Truss fears that it will. To counteract that possibility, she alerts us to just how essential precise punctuation can be to lucid expression. She outlines the multiple roles each punctuation mark plays, reminding us, for example, that "a re-formed rock band is quite different from a reformed one," while a sentence that reads "The people in the queue who managed to get tickets were very satisfied" leaves far fewer people satisfied than one that reads "The people in the queue, who managed to get tickets, were very satisfied."
Varying tastes in punctuation, Truss observes, can arouse incendiary passions among writers. Donald Barthelme, for instance, considered the semicolon "ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog's belly." George Bernard Shaw, by contrast, went ballistic over T.E. Lawrence's supposed "overuse" of colons: "You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life."
Truss can sometimes get a little too chatty ("Isn't this history interesting? Well, I think so — "), and her book is peppered with English slang that may have some American readers scratching their heads. But these quirks don't stop "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" from being a pleasurable romp for language lovers and bumblers alike.
A punctuation purist's bible storms the bestseller list.
By Michael Dirda
Sunday, May 23, 2004; Page BW15
EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES
The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
By Lynne Truss. Gotham. 209 pp. $17.50
Such a brilliant title! You might have almost predicted the success of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss's guide to punctuation. Even the most junior publicist could have charted the book's various psychological appeals: classroom memories of Strunk and White's dryly humorous and incisive Elements of Style; the ongoing vogue for concise palm-sized volumes about arcane subjects (Longitude being the fons et origo of the subgenre); the public's insatiable hunger for every kind of self-improvement; and -- perhaps most important of all -- the giddy bestseller list's notorious penchant for attracting the least likely titles, ranging from collections of kindergarten wisdom and accounts of alien visitations in Peru to volumes of soup-based advice, books with titles like What Color is Your Parachute?, those children's stories by over-the-hill pop stars and. . . . Well, just look for yourself.
Punctuation is fundamental to clear writing and quietly allows us to organize and orchestrate our most complex sentences. Note that the paragraph above employs virtually all the printers' marks discussed in Eats, Shoots & Leaves: exclamation point, comma, apostrophe, period, colon, semicolon, hyphen, parentheses, italics, dash, question mark, ellipsis. The main sentence may be over-long, but syntactically everything is (I hope) clear and the various little squigglies relatively unobtrusive. That's the great triumph of proper punctuation -- it does its job like some grammatical Jeeves, making sure that the most far-fetched prose presents itself to the world without syntactic embarrassment.
But the barbarians are at the gates! (I must calm down here -- once you start thinking consciously about punctuation, you can get carried away.) Lynne Truss, a British journalist, noticed that greengrocers were selling banana's and lemon's, a movie was titled "Two Weeks Notice" and shops offered CD's and video's. When sending e-mail, she remarked that more and more correspondents were dropping capitals, leaving out commas and sullying already banal prose with typographical smudges called emoticons, e.g., :--), a kind of sideways face, with the closed parenthesis representing an upturned mouth. And so Truss soon galloped to the rescue, first riding her hobbyhorse in a newspaper column about punctuation, then on a radio show called "Cutting a Dash," and finally for this book. Which, to her astonishment, became a "runaway" bestseller in Britain and is doing almost as well in the United States.
The title really is perfect: A panda walks into a café, orders and devours a sandwich, draws a gun, fires off a couple of rounds, then waddles off. "Why?" asks the bewildered waiter. "I'm a panda. Look it up." When the waiter checks out "Panda" in a reference book, he reads: "Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves." In the course of her book, Truss points out how other misplaced or missing commas have contributed to a bloody disaster during the Boer War, the hanging of traitor Roger Casement, and serious wrangling about novelist Graham Greene's will. To this day, vociferous arguments rage over the serial comma (known in England as the Oxford comma). Most style books maintain that you need only write "The red, white and blue flag" while the serialists insist on "The red, white, and blue flag." Truss sensibly maintains that "one shouldn't be too rigid about the Oxford comma." She goes on to say:
"For example, in the introduction to this book . . . I allude to punctuation marks as the traffic signals of language: 'they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.' And, well, I argued for that Oxford comma. It seemed to me that without the comma after 'detour,' this was a list of three instructions (the last a double one), not four. And here was a case where the stylistic reasons for its inclusion clearly outweighed the grammatical ones for taking it out. This was a decelerating sentence. The commas were incrementally applying the brakes. To omit the comma after 'detour' would have the sentence suddenly coasting at speed again instead of slowing down to the final halt."
Punctuation, as Truss repeatedly shows, calls forth violent emotions, and so please allow me to inject a personal note here. For years I have been making this very same argument and have judiciously employed serial commas in my carefully wrought, ever-euphonious, and possibly deathless prose. (See?) Yet my colleagues at Book World have scarcely waited for me to leave the building before they have swooped down on my sentences like grammatical comma-kazes. Triads became doublets. An extra pause for dramatic effect near a sentence's close -- lost to the world. Alas, the ordinary citizen little appreciates how such weekly heartbreaks mount up, how a once vigorous, optimistic soul may grow broken, cankered, and bitter. As Raymond Chandler once said, and truly: "I live for syntax."
Readers will find Eats, Shoots & Leaves a reliable guide. One would expect no less, after all. And yet it isn't a wholly satisfying book. For anyone seeking a punctuation reference for the desk, this one is overly padded with narrative and anecdote; what's more, it presents the English system, which differs slightly from the American (periods and commas are often outside quotation marks on the other side of the Atlantic). And there's no index. Truss certainly writes clearly and often with a pretty wit: "As a statement, 'no dogs please' is an indefensible generalisation, since many dogs do please, as a matter of fact; they make a point of it." Her diction neatly draws on British slang, technical terminology, and some appealingly unexpected adjectives and nouns (inglenook, palaver).
The problem lies in the book's tone. Its pitch strikes me as a little shrill, over bright. Truss often sounds like a journalist exaggerating both her feelings and her prose for cutesy effect. As a result, the humorous flourishes sometimes come across as forced, brittle, even slightly condescending: "I hear there are now Knightsbridge clinics offering semicolonic irrigation. . . . That imaginative chap Charlemagne (forward-looking Holy Roman Emperor). " She asserts, twice, that she would like to have carried the babies of the Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius (reputed inventor of the semicolon).
Oh well. People don't like all my jokes either, and it's hard to argue against the evidence of huge sales. Still, I think Karen Elizabeth Gordon's several books about grammar and punctuation (e.g., The Deluxe Transitive Vampire) offer a more delicious, raffiné wit, while also being efficiently organized for practical use. But Eats, Shoots & Leaves deserves your attention, if only for its final plea to preserve the rudiments of correct punctuation against the onslaught of e-mail netspeak. Let Truss have the final, telling word:
"Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac. 'That's not writing, it's typing.' I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn't writing, and doesn't even qualify as typing either: it's just sending." •
'I used to feel
intimidated.Not any more'
Her book Eats, Shoots and
Leaves has now notched up two million sales. Here Lynne Truss explains why a
lifetime of low self-esteem and the death of her sister are the real story
behind its phenomenal success
Robert McCrum
Sunday June 13, 2004
The Observer
She has licked Harry Potter to a custard. She is America's number-one bestseller
from New York to San Francisco. Despite her book's fearsome subtitle ('The Zero
Tolerance Approach to Punctuation'), she is outselling hot-cakes in Korea, Hong
Kong, Singapore and Australia. And, in the age of Bush and the war on terror,
her quirky little guide to commas and semi-colons has become a global hit.
The nice thing about Lynne Truss is that she still can't quite believe it. 'It's really surreal,' she says, with the puzzled expression of a shy forest creature. 'You do think that someone is having a laugh here, and I've been set up.'
Well, she has been set up, of course. For life. So now she finds herself doing sums all the time, cautiously halving the estimate of her new riches 'because all sorts of people are going to take cuts'. Quite apart from the scale of the thing, it has all happened so fast. 'I do a lot of very strange calculations which a year ago I wouldn't have believed I would be doing.'
When lightning strikes in the world of books, its victims can be scorched beyond recognition. Lynne Truss, however, meets her good fortune with the wisdom of experience, with characteristic English phlegm, and with an instinctive irony. When she was asked on American television if she intends to make a film of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, she replied, deadpan: 'Julia Roberts as an apostrophe and Schwarzenegger as an exclamation mark.'
The jokes come naturally. She has a detached and humorous view of life and has always wanted to be a comic writer. As a child of the mid-Fifties, she read Molesworth and AP Herbert and listened to Tony Hancock records with her parents, whose taste was more Steptoe than the Goons. The title of her book comes from the gag about the panda which has been a staple for British comedians since the Fifties, and probably before.
I suspect that Truss's sense of humour conceals a fairly well-defended inner melancholy. Behind the laughter and the overnight success - which is nothing of the sort; Truss has been writing for years - is a sadder story of a woman lacking in confidence who has had to conquer a number of real and imagined obstacles to become the writer she is today.
She was a late starter. 'I didn't begin writing properly until I was in my mid-thirties,' she says. 'I had to overcome a big barrier. I thought that people were born with the right sort of certificate that said, "This person is allowed to write" and I didn't have it.' Truss underwent therapy to tackle her self-esteem problems and to liberate her urge to write. She now says it was 'class' that prevented her from feeling 'good enough to write'.
Truss grew up on a working-class council estate near Richmond, west London. Her father was a self-taught accountant who did the books for the company which made Sellotape. Her mother was a former telephonist. Neither sounds ambitious for themselves or their daughter, but she was hardly deprived.
Hers was a classic suburban upbringing - a tight-lipped, stable, reasonably secure, not-very-joyful double-income family in which young Lynne would sit on the stairs, retreat into the adventures of Rider Haggard and John Wyndham, and keep herself apart.
'It was a very divided family,' she says. 'No one was happy.' Her parents were not bookish, but, she says: 'They were both interested in writing. I think there was always an idea that to write a book was probably the biggest achievement you could have.'
When she describes her upbringing, she sounds like an only child, but it turns out that she had an older sister with whom she was close in a complicated and competitive way. She says of her family that 'there were always feuds going on, and people not speaking to each other', but thanks to the 1944 Education Act, she was able to escape. She passed her 11 plus, went to Kingston Grammar, and then on to London University, where she was lucky enough to be taught by John Sutherland and AS Byatt.
Her first job was working as a sub-editor on the Radio Times. Then she went to the Times Higher Educational Supplement, from there to the Listener, where she became literary editor and also wrote a column. The Listener, alas, is long gone and her column long lost. But it survives, in a pureed form, in a book she published in 1995, Making the Cat Laugh, in which she strung together her observations of 'single life on the margins' into a wry and comic account of Being Lynne Truss.
That was rather ahead of its author's time, but now that she's a global mega-hit, her publisher is reissuing this volume, together with three comic novels (Going Loco, Tennyson's Gift and With One Lousy Free Packet of Seeds). These four volumes will certainly gratify anyone who has actually read Eats, Shoots and Leaves, and further demonstrate a sprightly, self-deprecating humour and intermittently betray that continuing battle with her self-esteem. Going Loco begins: 'Since being the heroine of her own life was never quite to be Belinda's fate...' When it came out in 1999, that was probably quite an accurate summary of Truss's situation.
Eats, Shoots and Leaves has certainly made her the heroine of her own life and put a spring in her step. 'I feel more centred in my life, to be honest,' she says. 'With the book [ Eats, Shoots and Leaves ], there's one amazing change, which is that I've always been very intimidated by the world and at the moment I'm not. I'm not as worried about people's opinions as I was. I mean I still hurt, but I just feel, "Well, I don't care, it's their problem."'
Sadly, for those who might want to attribute this transformation to good reviews, this new toughness comes not from massive sales but from great per sonal pain: 'My sister died three-and-a- half years ago and that was the biggest family event in my life.' Truss says that her sister's death has made her re-evaluate herself. She has also had to come to terms with the nature of that relationship. 'One of the awful, tragic things about her dying is that she would have hated this [success]. She would have been very unhappy about [the book] doing so well, because she always hated it when nice things happened.'
The genesis of Eats, Shoots and Leaves has been widely described (popular Radio 4 programme... publisher's book-party commission... written to a rushed deadline... unexpected rave reviews), but Truss now comes close to conceding that she could not have done this while her sister was alive. 'I just feel that, somehow, I'm allowed to have this now,' she says. And when she goes on, that old self-esteem problem recurs, 'I obviously didn't deserve it before, but I feel as though it somehow couldn't have happened. I would have been just too worried about how it would have affected my sister.'
On the table between us as we speak is a huge pile of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, all signed by the author, but just at this moment all that feels pretty unimportant.
'I think going through the death of someone you love, and surviving it... when you feel as though you've terribly let them down because they died and you didn't, I think all that gets you into perspective.'
Does this change her view of life? 'Well, you do think: "Enjoy things while they're good." At the moment in my life, nobody's dying. As you get older the periods between grief get shorter, and you just sort of enjoy the bits when there's nothing horrible happening. It's not a great philosophy, and not very profound, but it's what I've arrived at.'
If Truss has an inkling about what's important to her now, she is agreeably puzzled by the success of her little book. 'With everything that's going on in the world, it is rather odd that people should be concerning themselves with semi-colons. There must be a real comfort in looking at something with sets of rules, and which you can also have fun with when there are so many awful things going on. Some people buy it for instruction because a lot of people haven't been taught much about grammar. There are a lot of very bright people around who have never had the training and who wonder, "Why do I put the apostrophe in?"'
Despite this air of puzzlement, she was never terribly surprised. (After all, at two million copies and rising, you'd have to feel pretty confident that you were doing something right.)
'I did have this moment of clarity. I was here [at the publishers] signing copies before publication, and there was a flap about a reprint, and they were saying, "We could do 10 or 15 thousand." And I said, "I don't think you'll be stuck with them."'
None of this certainty saved her from the usual visitation of worries. Lynne Truss is the kind of person who gains peace of mind by making lists of things to do. Last Christmas, when the book was the season's sensation she found herself worrying about Uncle Fred. 'I signed a lot of copies for Uncle Fred. It was, "Oh, Uncle Fred, he's such a stickler!" and I thought there was a danger that Uncle Fred would get 10 copies for Christmas and he'd take nine of them back on Boxing Day, and we'd have the biggest churn rate of any book in history.'
Fortunately, it turned out that dear old Uncle Fred simply loved having 10 copies. It became a matter of pride with dyed-in-the-wool sticklers and pedants to note how many copies they got for Christmas. Ian Hislop, apparently, got no fewer than five.
The delight Lynne Truss has brought to the nation's sticklers and the honest satisfaction she will no doubt soon be giving her bank manager when the accountants have done their worst, has not been an unmixed blessing to Truss herself. Eats, Shoots and Leaves has 'transformed my life' she says. 'I hardly write a thing now. I talk much more than I write at the moment, and that's very strange.'
Now, fresh from the rigours of the American book promotion circuit, she longs to retreat to her flat in Brighton and get stuck into her next project, a set of radio monologues (she describes herself as a writer and broadcaster). In 2002, before she was famous, she did a sequence about women in their forties, and now wants to do a similar set about men - 'Stories about a father, a brother, a son...'
'I like writing men,' she says, and, although she has never married, adds with slight defensiveness: 'I've lived with lots of people... about half my adult life. It's much more that I've been with people than without really. But when I'm without people, I tend to write about it, because I feel so happy.' She glosses this quickly. 'But I don't hate men or anything. I really like men.' She adds that when she's asked to comment by her women friends on a relationship break-up: 'I often see the man's point of view'.
She does not encourage further exploration of this subject, but her books certainly suggest a woman who has, for one reason or another, not stumbled across the right partner. Perhaps nice, funny, accommodating Lynne Truss has been too eager to please. 'If I was to get analytical about it, to make my dad laugh was probably what I've been trying to do all my life.'
She's fairly sure than even if he didn't laugh at Eats, Shoots and Leaves, her father would be proud of her success. And that's enough to be going on with in the Man Department. She gets quite annoyed by newspaper critics who say that her interest in punctuation means that, by definition, she doesn't have a life. She smiles at the irony that's coming into view.
'Of course I have no answer to this because doing the book did deprive me of a life. So when people say, "You ought to get a life", I reply, "You're right. Absolutely. There's just no time to get one."'
For the moment, she seems happy enough at the prospect of her well-crafted, domestic English comedies getting a new lease of life in the bookshops. 'I think making people laugh is a great joy,' she says, simply.
