Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [2]
Personally, I clung on to one thing when Eats, Shoots & Leaves began its rush up the charts. Since the rallying cry for the book had been chosen pretty early on, I referred to it continually to steady my nerves and remind myself of my original aspirations—which were certainly plucky but at the same time not the least bit confident of universal appeal. “Sticklers unite!” I had written as this rallying cry. “You have nothing to lose but your sense of proportion (and arguably you didn’t have a lot of that to begin with).” There you are, then. My hopes for Eats, Shoots & Leaves were bold but bathetic; chirpy but feet-on-the-ground; presumptuous yet significantly parenthetical. My book was aimed at the tiny minority of British people “who love punctuation and don’t like to see it mucked about with”. When my own mother suggested we print on the front of the book “For the select few,” I was hurt, I admit it; I bit my lip and blinked a tear. Yet I knew what she meant. I am the writer, after all, who once wrote a whole comic novel about Lewis Carroll and Alfred, Lord Tennyson and expected other people to be interested. Oh yes, I have learned that lesson the hard way.
I still have no idea whether sticklers are uniting in the UK, but I somehow doubt it, despite the staggering sales. Grammatical sticklers are the worst people for finding common cause because it is in their nature (obviously) to pick holes in everyone, even their best friends. Honestly, what an annoying bunch of people. One supporter of Eats, Shoots & Leaves wrote a 1,400-word column in The Times of London explaining (with glorious self-importance) that while his admiration for my purpose was “total”, he disagreed with virtually everything I said. So I am not sure my stickler-chums are, as I write this, sitting down to get things sorted out. What did become depressingly clear, however, was that my personal hunches about the state of the language were horribly correct: standards of punctuation in general in the UK are indeed approaching the point of illiteracy; self-justified philistines (“Get a life!”) are truly in the driving seat of our culture; and a lot of well-educated sensitive people really have been weeping friendlessly in caves for the past few years, praying for someone—anyone—to write a book about punctuation with a panda on the cover.
I don’t know how bad things are in America, but in the UK I cannot emphasise it enough: standards of punctuation are abysmal. Encouraged to conduct easy tests on television, I discovered to my horror that most British people truly do not know their apostrophe from their elbow. “I’m an Oxbridge intellectual,” slurred a chap in Brighton, where we were asking passers-by to “pin the apostrophe on the sentence” for a harmless afternoon chat-show. He immediately placed an apostrophe (oh no!) in a possessive “its”. The high-profile editor of a national newspaper made the same mistake on a morning show, scoring two correct points out of a possible seven. On a TV news bulletin, the results of a vox pop item were shown on screen under the heading “Grammer Test”—the spelling of which I assumed was a joke until I realised nobody in the studio was laughing. Meanwhile well-wishers sent hundreds of delightful/horrific examples of idiotic sign-writing, my current favourite being the roadside warning CHILDREN DRIVE SLOWLY—courtesy of the wonderful Shakespearean actor Timothy West. Evidently, this sign—inadvertently descriptive of the disappointing road speeds attainable by infants at the wheel—was eventually altered (but sadly not improved) by the addition of a comma, becoming CHILDREN, DRIVE SLOWLY—a kindly exhortation, perhaps, which might even save lives among those self-same reckless juvenile road-users; but still not quite what the