Eats, Shoots and leaves
Lynne Truss
London: Profile Books, 2003
21.50€, 209 pages, ISBN 1 86197 612 7 (hardback).

Mireille Quivy
Université de Rouen

Dear reader, is there indeed anything less attractive and apparently more depressing than a linguist’s treatise on punctuation, endlessly enumerating the rules presiding over the academically correct use of commas and dots, dashes and colons? What could invite the layman to open such a book and read beyond page one? Talent could be the answer. And if talent means simplicity, humour, and readability, in the field of punctuation it can now to some extent spell Lynne Truss.

Indeed, Eats, Shoots and Leaves can read like an attempt to encourage linguistics to step down from its lofty pedestal guarded by indomitable metalanguage and revamp itself in order to become accessible, and even enjoyable. What Lynne Truss proposes is more than just instruct the reader about punctuation; her ambition is to make us love punctuation [p. 33], even though this may require a zero-tolerance approach to it.

The book is divided into seven chapters of about thirty-five pages each, dealing with each of the signs of punctuation in turn. The introduction, dubbed “the seventh sense” immediately plunges the reader into the nightmarish Acheron of misspelling. Like all horror scenes, the vision of erratic signs invading the text is supposed to stir emotions and stimulate reaction. For these signs are no forerunners of Providence, they are the sinful markers of ignorance foreshadowing the progressive destruction of the grammatical pantheon. To eradicate them, Truss therefore advocates radical action and demands that all sticklers be armed with pen and paint and wage the war against loss of good manners in style.

So much for the extensive metaphorical use of the semantic field of war and of hyperbole that haunts the text as a lost battle would a veteran’s memory. It is however true that unless one can read Ulysses without ever frowning a hesitation or a doubt, punctuation is indeed what guides our understanding of a text, shedding light on its syntax as well as replacing the pauses of variable length in speech that would manifest its pragmatic quality.

Quoting Thomas McCormack (The Fiction Editor, the Novel and the Novelist, 1989), Truss insists that the purpose of punctuation is “to tango the reader into the pauses, inflections, continuities and connections that the spoken line would convey” [p. 202]. This is therefore a clear enough statement of the necessity of conforming to certain rules in matters of textual behaviour, some being strict, others requiring the application of “a good ear to good sense” [p. 27]. In Chapter Two, “The Tractable Apostrophe,” which abounds in anthropomorphic and zoological metaphors, witticisms and tongue-in-cheek assertions, the author reminds us of the origins of the word "apostrophe," derived from the Greek, and used as early as the sixteenth century to mean "omission" or "elision." After examining the avatars of aphaeresis and the like, Truss launches into a sexist diatribe that, for all the truth there may be in it, verges on bad taste:

And she goes on enumerating instances of “bad” use of the apostrophe. But one is left wondering: is the apostrophe a punctuation sign proper, like the comma or the full stop, since it does not actually divide sentences and phrases and does not imply any sort of pause in oral speech? The definition given by dictionaries does not state that punctuation may indeed mean elision: “punctuation: the marks used in writing that divide sentences and phrases” (Oxford, Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 2000). The apostrophe may seem to mark syntactic relationships between linguistic items (in N’s N constructions for example: the man’s hat) or phonetic variation (cannot / can’t) but this is mere semantisation of its primary function as a marker of elision (the real marker in the N’s N construction is in fact the final –es reduced to ‘s). Some sort of comment on this particularity of the apostrophe would have been welcome in order to help young readers discriminate between actual punctuation signs and others.

Chapter Three, “That’ll Do, Comma,” starts with the now famous logomachiac duels between J. Thurber, a commaphobe, and New Yorker editor Ross, a commaphile, in the 1930s and 40s. Then Truss defines the uses of the comma, with special attention paid to Fowler and the Oxford comma [p. 84], the splice comma [p. 87], the comma as gap-filler and direct speech marker, before advising the reader to use the comma “with intelligent discretion and to be simply alert to potential ambiguity” [p. 96]. In Chapter Four, “Airs and Graces,” the author studies the dancing of colons and semicolons on the page, illustrating its tempo with a famous passage of Mrs. Dalloway [p. 107]. Quoted in counterpoint are G. Orwell, M. Amis, D. Barthelme and even G. Stein, who argued that the semicolon was “an unnecessary stop,” “ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly,” “imposing and pretentious” [p. 108]. Truss also notes that both colon and semicolon tend to grow outdated, the dash being most often used in their place:

Surprisingly enough, this transition managed to the title of Chapter Five, “Cutting a Dash,” is not followed by considerations on that sign of punctuation but by developments on the lanky exclamation mark and the plump question mark. The former—the fifteenth century “note of admiration,” so frequent in humorous writing—is labelled “the equivalent of canned laughter” [pp. 136-137] and should accordingly be used sparingly. The latter, the question mark, is also a “terminator” and as such apparently not worth much interest.

From this point onwards, Truss’s prose gradually loses its entertaining quality and light-heartedness to become more “serious” and sometimes vindictive. The chapter rambles on to italics, criticized because “they are a confession of artistic failure” [p. 147] and attract the eye before the reader has even started reading a page; then to quotation marks, used for the first time in 1714 “to denote direct speech” [p. 151]—and here, Lynne Truss’s home-rules are not always in complete agreement with the MLA or the Chicago Manual of Style. Last but not least comes again the harmless dash, “the mark à la mode” [p. 157] because it is so easy to use and so convenient, to create “a dramatic disjunction which can be exploited for humour, for bathos, for shock” [p. 159]. Following this dash come the brackets, round, square, braced or angled “lifting up a section of a sentence, holding it a foot or two above the rest” [p. 161]. Chapter Six, “A Little Used Punctuation Mark,” stands apart from the rest and could well have been integrated into Chapter Five, so short it is. It deals with the hyphen, the lifter of all ambiguities that joins and disjoins at one and the same time and seems to fulfil this temporary function between the body of the book and the last chapter, “Merely Conventional Signs.” In this last part, Lynne Truss abandons her former subject to discuss the future of books, the decline of punctuation standards and the invasion of email and SMS style into proper writing, with emoticons taking the place of qualifiers.

As a whole, Eats, Shoots and Leaves is a manifesto for the preservation of punctuation. Like the endangered panda the title alludes to*, the text can be the victim of displaced signs and fall in the traps of ambiguity, double-entendre or worse, nonsense; an exercise in style, the book is humorously written, peppered with anecdotes, puns, jokes, audacious metaphors, challenging assertions, thought-provoking questions. It is also a didactic work teaching punctuation rules the lighter way and thus making them easier to remember. It can be repetitive, sometimes irritating (with its over-emphasis on the stickler theme and its self-centeredness) but it is certainly valuable and deserves a place in the front row on our academic shelves. All students of English as a foreign language should have read it before trying their skills at translation and literary interpretation. A good read, indeed.

 

*Most people know the story that gave birth to this title, but in case someone did not, here it is: A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats, then draws a gun and shoots in the air. “Why?” asks the waiter, as the panda makes for the door. The panda produces a wildlife dictionary and throws it on the nearest table. “I’m a panda,” he says, “look up the word!” The waiter finds the entry and reads the badly punctuated definition: “Panda. Large, black-and-white mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”