“We [punctuation sticklers] are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else–yet we see it all the time. No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to ‘get a life’ by people who, interestingly enough, display no evidence of having lives themselves.” (Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves)
The title of this book is taken from an old joke:
A panda walks into a bar, sits down and orders a sandwich. He eats the sandwich, pulls out an AK47 and starts to shoot up the place, shattering windows, chewing up the bar, destroying tables and chairs. The moment he stops, the bartender pops up from behind the bar.
“What’s wrong with you? We made your sandwich just the way your ordered it. Service was fast and polite. WHY ON EARTH DID YOU DESTROY MY PLACE?”
The panda tosses a badly punctuated wildlife manual on the bar. “I’m a panda. Look it up,” he says, and walks out.
The bartender opens the book. He reads, “Panda. A tree-dwelling mammal of Asian origin. Distinct black-and-white markings. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
Bad punctuation is definitely no laughing matter. All the same, I laughed myself silly reading this book. As a matter of fact, I was reading it at lunchtime one day, laughing out loud, tears rolling down my cheeks, when a co-worker passed by.
Her: “Good book?”
Me: Gasp, giggle, snort, guffaw. “Great book!”
Her: Smiling and looking interested, because she’s always on the hunt for good books, “What’s it about?”
Me: Still chortling, “Punctuation.”
Her: No longer smiling, “You’re kidding, right?”
Nope. First of all, you’ve got to love a book built around the rallying cry, “Sticklers unite!” It’s even better if the book in question exhorts you to “unleash your Inner Stickler,” despite the fact that “members of your family abhor your Inner Stickler and devoutly wish you had an Inner Scooby-Doo instead.”
The point is this: Lynne Truss knows punctuation is important. You might not like it, but that’s the way it is. Punctuation keeps words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs in line. Periods, commas, semicolons and dashes are markers–guideposts for the reader, traffic signals facilitating the clear transmission of thoughts and information. A world without punctuation would be a world of … well … incredibly messy run-on sentences and muddled thinking. (And the Lord knows, there’s already more than enough muddled thinking to go around!)
Lynne also knows, however, that a book about punctuation had better be entertaining, because most folks find reading about punctuation almost–but not quite–as exciting as watching paint dry. Trust me, stickler or no, you’ll find this book hilarious. No, really. Give it a try. If you don’t like it, you can send me an email with no punctuation at all, then sit back and enjoy the fact that you’ve driven me right over the edge.
