 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
Eats Shoots & Leaves
By Lynne Truss
Profile $29.95
 British journalist and literary editor Lynne Truss confesses a 'zero tolerance' for the misuse of the English language and is a 'stickler' for the rules and conventions that mean little to people who exhibit 'plain illiteracy' ("...giving the full name and title of the person who's details are given in Section 02" - UK passport application form) or have no idea where an apostrophe is required ("mens coat's").
Her parody of grammatical laziness is encapsulated by the title of this elegant tirade: a panda walks into a cafe, orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. When asked 'Why?' by the waiter, the animal makes for the exit, tossing a badly punctuated wildlife manual over its shoulder, exclaiming, "Look it up."
"Panda," the waiter reads, is a "Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
It is heartening to know that a book espousing rules so widely broken has been selling so well. Such was also the case with Death Sentence, a lament for the demise of public language by Don Watson, former Paul Keating biographer, who skewered managerial-speak with relish.
Truss shares Watson's precision agenda but focuses on the rules of punctuation, observing that her essay on commas, hyphens, apostrophes and their ilk 'will ring bells for you, or it won't.'
Those who see the plural word 'Book's' with an apostrophe in it will experience a shock that soon 'gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.'
Hence the front cover where the aforementioned (no hyphen, note) panda is up there scrubbing out the comma that so misrepresented its living habits.
Peter Carey used no commas in True History of the Kelly Gang, lawyers tend to regard them as 'troublemakers' to be used as seldom as possible, and newspaper editors have thrown ashtrays at each other in arguments about how they should be employed.
'Readers grow so accustomed to the dwindling incidence of commas in public places that when signs go up saying "No dogs please", only one person in a thousand bothers to point out that actually, as a statement, "no dogs please" is an indefensible generalisation, since many dogs do please, as a matter of fact; they rather make a point of it.'
And that's the point of the whole exercise: let's get our language right, because if we can't, who else can?
- Thanks to Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore for supporting this column.
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