A Saucy Tale of Mistaken Commas and Missing Apostrophes

Stuart Mitchner

Lynne Truss is a self-proclaimed "stickler" for proper punctuation. The author's photo on the jacket of her best-selling book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (Gotham, $17.50), shows her with a marking pen in the act of attempting to add an apostrophe after the "s" in a poster advertising the movie Two Weeks Notice. The absence of that apostrophe (in letters four feet high on the side of a London bus) stunned her to a standstill one day. This traumatic event is only one example of the "ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement" that ultimately inspired her to write this book.

Only a hardcore stickler would clutter the title with that flyspeck apostrophe. References to the movie online almost unanimously reject the punctuation mark that would legitimize the title and soothe the author's fevered brow.

Lynne Truss hardly needs soothing. Like Liberace, she "cries all the way to the bank." In last Wednesday's New York Times, a full-page full-color ad heralded "The #1 New York Times Bestseller," boasting over 1,000,000 copies in print. It's been on the non-fiction best-seller list longer than anything, including Bill Clinton's autobiography, and, yes, it's about punctuation. You feel like asking "What's a cute little thing like you doing in a place like this?"

How did it happen? First, imagine Bridget Jones as a playful pedant with a gift for catchy analogies and a way of "sexing up" stale data. Give her book the hook of the cute title and the cute companion anecdote where an errant comma turns an innocent panda who eats shoots and leaves into a gun-toting panda who eats, shoots, and leaves. For the dust jacket, draw the panda Winnie-the-Pooh style standing on a ladder painting over the comma, and you're on your way. But of course it all had to begin in England, where the book became what the publishers call "a runaway best-seller" and set off debates in Parliament. My guess is it would not have run away in the States without the boost of its success in Britain. After all, we live in a country where the subject of debate is more likely to be exposed nipples than missing or misused apostrophes and where the president himself is an admitted abuser of the English language. Come to think of it, maybe that's one reason a book on the fine points has done so well here. Maybe the abominations visited on sense and syntax not just in the White House but in every facet of American life have sparked public interest in this chatty polemic.

It is also something of a minor miracle for a British author to publish a book in the United States without having to endure the imposition of American style on English spelling, and, most significantly, English punctuation. American readers accustomed to seeing commas and periods staying put inside quotation marks – where sanity is "To be or not to be," not "To be or not to be", – are sure to be distracted by these British idiosyncrasies, especially in a book where such things are at the heart of the argument. No self-respecting American copyeditor would let "eats, shoots and leaves", (as it appears in the text) go by without sticking a comma after "shoots" and tucking that lost lonely little comma back into the sheltering arms of the quotation marks. To further confuse things, Ms. Truss uses the American-style double rather than British-style single quotation marks and then goes about sticking commas and periods inside (yes, inside) the quotes whenever the quoted material is more substantial than a fragmented excerpt. Thus she violates one of the essential principals in matters of style: consistency.

In his thoroughly negative New Yorker review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Louis Menand claims that adhering to British usage "makes the book virtually useless for American readers." But it's useless only if you take it seriously as a guide, which is not its intention; it's an "approach." To attack this little book with the quantity of eloquence and intelligence Mr. Menand brings to it is a bit like pounding the cute little panda on the cover with a Weapon of Mass Destruction.

So, how serious is this U.S.-U.K. inside/outside conflict? We're allies in Iraq, after all. Think of it in human terms: imagine Tony Blair like the English period shivering outside the quotation marks, bareheaded, with no umbrella, while "W" huddles safe and dry inside. Why? The Brits would say it's because the quoted material should be unfettered by intrusive marks. Here in the land of the free we'd say it's just not right to leave that poor period standing out there in the cold like a wallflower at the prom (or a pet poodle in the rain).

If the preceding paragraph seems a bit over-the-top, it's only meant to reflect what goes on in Eats, Shoots & Leaves. You can hear Bridget Jones for sure when Ms. Truss gushes over that Medieval hunk, Aldus Manutius, who invented the italic typeface and printed the first semicolon: "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."

This Bridget also has an insatiable appetite for anthropomorphic fun and games, as when she has the semicolon calling "a bunch of brawling commas to attention" or when she compares the colon to "a well-trained magician's assistant," or pictures the comma as a dog "racing about with its ears back," and an exclamation point as an "emphatic little black blighter sitting cheerfully on the page." Family values? In the family of punctuation "the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy," the semicolon "quietly practices the piano with crossed hands," and the exclamation point is the "big attention-deficit brother who gets over-excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly." As she carries on happily mixing her metaphors and indulging in an almost non-stop orgy of analogy, it's obvious she's having a good time – and so are most of her readers.

One of the virtues of Eats, Shoots & Leaves is not just that it heightens your awareness of the subtle signals and limits punctuation sends and sets but that it makes you appreciate the anti-sticklers, the prose anarchists and poet adventurers like e.e. cummings, whose sly transgressions mocked the rules and conventions we go through school paying forced homage to. Down with capital letters! Who needs syntactical order or straight lines when you can bend words and break 'em in half? In Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne has a ball playing fast and loose with dashes and asterisks. Ms. Truss compares punctuation to stitching. When it's missing, language "comes apart, and the buttons fall off." True enough, Sterne and Cummings and Joyce, among many, split the seams. So does J.D. Salinger when he offers the reader "a bouquet of very early blooming parentheses (((())))" and proceeds to see them as "buckle-legged owners of my state of mind and body at this writing."

Looked at from this direction, the "zero tolerance approach" would seem to be against everything that makes life and literature exciting. Why waste time on the petty "horror" of the unpunctuated Two Weeks Notice? Go read Walt Whitman and swim in a sea of exclamation points, hyphens, and ellipses. Or read the title poem in C.K. Williams's book The Singing. No punctuation, not a comma, not a period, nothing, everything pure and open, except for the quotation marks around "Big," the only word spoken in this edgy Princeton encounter. Or read Joyce, who does away with quotation marks in dialogue altogether, preferring dashes instead.

But then quotation marks have become part of the sign language of contemporary life. I wonder who was the first person to raise two fingers of either hand and wiggle them in the air to indicate some ironic or qualified something-or-other about a particular word or phrase. Perhaps it came from the hand-signals used for communicating with the deaf. Whatever can be said for or against Ms. Truss's book, it's nice to see it holding its own on the best-seller list even if the style is a bit (hands in the air, wiggle fingers) "much."