Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [0]
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Publisher’s Note
Preface
Introduction – The Seventh Sense
The Tractable Apostrophe
That’ll Do, Comma
Airs and Graces
Cutting a Dash
A Little Used Punctuation Mark
Merely Conventional Signs
Bibliography
GOTHAM BOOKS
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Published by Gotham Books, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Originally published in Great Britain in 2003 by Profile Books, Ltd.
First American Electronic Edition, April 2004
Copyright © 2003 by Lynne Truss
Foreword copyright © 2004 by Frank McCourt
All rights reserved
Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
ISBN: 978-1-1012-1829-7
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To the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution
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Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the many writers on punctuation who did all the hard work of formulating the clear rules I have doubtless muddied in this book. G. V. Carey’s Mind the Stop (1939) and Eric Partridge’s You Have a Point There (1953) are acknowledged classics; modern writers such as David Crystal, Loreto Todd, Graham King, Keith Waterhouse, Tim Austin, Kingsley Amis, Philip Howard, Nicholson Baker, William Hartston and R. L. Trask were all inspirational. Special thanks go to Cathy Stewart, Anne Baker and Gillian Forrester; also to Penny Vine, who set me off on this journey in the first place. Nigel Hall told me the panda joke; Michael Handelzalts told me about the question mark in Hebrew; and Adam Beeson told me where to find the dash on my keyboard. Learned copy-editors have attempted to sort out my commas and save me from embarrassment. I thank them very much. Where faults obstinately remain, they are mine alone. Finally, I would like to thank Andrew Franklin for his encouraging involvement along the way, and the hundreds of readers who generously responded to articles in The Daily Telegraph, The Author and Writers’ News. It was very good to know that I was not alone.
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Foreword
If Lynne Truss were Catholic I’d nominate her for sainthood. As it is, thousands of English teachers from Maine to Maui will be calling down blessings on her merry, learned head for the gift of her book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves.
It’s a book about punctuation. Punctuation, if you don’t mind! (I hesitated over that exclamation mark, and it’s all her doing.) The book is so spirited, so scholarly, those English teachers will sweep all other topics aside to get to, you guessed it, punctuation. Parents and children will gather by the fire many an evening to read passages on the history of the semicolon and the terrible things being done to the apostrophe.