Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [1]
There are heroes and villains in this book. Oh, you never thought such could be possible? You never thought a book on punctuation could contain raw sex? Well, here is Lynne Truss bemoaning the sad fact she never volunteered to have the babies of Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450–1515). (Help! In that last sentence does the period go inside the parenthesis/bracket or outside?) If you actually know who Aldus was you get the door prize and, perhaps, Ms. Truss will have your babies.
Aldus Manutius the Elder invented the italic typeface and printed the first semicolon. His son, yes, Aldus the Younger, declared in 1566, “that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax.”
“Ho hum,” you say or, if you’re American, “Big deal.” Very well. You’re entitled to your ignorance, but pause a moment, dear reader, and imagine this page of deathless prose, the one you’re reading, without punctuation.
In the villain department I think greengrocers get a bad rap. No, this doesn’t come from Ms. Truss. She merely notes their tendency to stick in apostrophes where apostrophes had never gone before. I feel no such sympathy for the manager of my local supermarket who must have a cellarful of apostrophes he doesn’t know what to do with: “Egg’s, $1.29 a doz.,” for heaven’s sake! (In the U.S. it’s “heaven’s sakes.”)
Egg’s, and it’s not even a possessive.
Lynne Truss has a great soul and I wouldn’t mind drinking tea out of a saucer with her—when you read the book you’ll see what I mean—except that, on occasion, she lets her Inner Stickler get out of hand. She tells us of “a shopkeeper in Bristol who deliberately stuck ungrammatical signs in his window as a ruse to draw people into the shop; they would come to complain, and he would then talk them into buying something.” Then she flings down the gauntlet: “ . . . he would be ill-advised to repeat this ploy once my punctuation vigilantes are on the loose.” (Notice my masterly use of the ellipsis. Hold your admiration. I owe it all to Lynne.)
I would have that Bristol shopkeeper knighted. Imagine the conversations in his shop. Irate customers skewering him on points of grammar. You could write a play, a movie on this shopkeeper. Track him down, Lynne. Bring him to London. Present him at court.
On second thought, present Lynne Truss at court. The Queen needs cheering up, and what better way than to wax sexy with Ms. Truss over Aldus Manutius, the Elder and the Younger, their italics, their proto-semicolon.
O, to be an English teacher in the Age of Truss.
—Frank McCourt
January 2004
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Publisher’s Note
Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves has been reprinted exactly as it was in its original British edition, complete with British examples, spellings and, yes, punctuation. There are a few subtle differences between British and American punctuation which the author has addressed in her preface to the North American edition. Any attempt at a complete Americanization of this book would have been akin to an effort to Americanize the Queen of England: futile and, this publisher feels, misguided. Please enjoy this narrative history of punctuation as it was meant to be enjoyed, bone-dry humour and cultural references intact, courtesy of Lynne Truss and all of us here at Gotham Books.
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Preface
To be clear from the beginning: no one involved in the production of Eats, Shoots & Leaves expected the words “runaway” and “bestseller” would ever be associated with it, let alone upon the cover of an American edition. Had the Spirit of Christmas Bestsellers Yet to Come knocked at the rather modest front door of my small London publisher in the summer of 2003 and said, “I see hundreds of thousands of copies of your little book about punctuation sold before Christmas. It will be debated in every national newspaper and mentioned, yea, even in the House of Lords, where a woman named Lady Strange—I kid thee not—will actually tell the panda joke,