Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [3]
By far the oddest and most demoralising response to my book, however, took place at a bookshop event in Piccadilly. It is a story that, if nothing else, proves the truth of that depressing old adage about taking a horse to water. I was signing copies of my book when a rather bedraggled woman came up and said, despairingly, “Oh, I’d love to learn about punctuation.” Spotting a sure thing (you know how it is), I said with a little laugh, “Then this is the book for you, madam!” I believe my pen actually hovered above the dedication page, as I waited for her to tell me her name.
“No, I mean it,” she insisted—as if I had disagreed with her. “I really would love to know how to do it. I mean, I did learn it at school, but I’ve forgotten it now, and it’s awful. I put all my commas in the wrong place, and as for the apostrophe . . . !” I nodded, still smiling. This all seemed familiar enough. “So shall I sign it to anyone in particular?” I said. “And I’m a teacher,” she went on. “And I’m quite ashamed really, not knowing about grammar and all that; so I’d love to know about punctuation, but the trouble is, there’s just nowhere you can turn, is there?”
This was quite unsettling. She shrugged, defeated, and I hoped she would go away. I said again that the book really did explain many basic things about punctuation; she said again that the basic things of punctuation were exactly what nobody was ever prepared to explain to an adult person. I must admit, I started to wonder feverishly whether I was being secretly filmed by publishers of rival punctuation books who had set up the whole thing. I even wondered briefly: had any author in Hatchards (a bookseller established in 1797) ever hit a customer, or was I destined to be the first? Throughout the encounter, I kept smiling at her and nodding at the book, but she never took the hint. In the end, thank goodness, she slid away, leaving me to put my coat over my head and scream.
It was the same kind of strenuous apathy, I suppose, that I refer to on page ref, drawing on the deathless line in Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks: “I’ve always wanted to know how to spell Connecticut.” I tend to feel that if a person genuinely wants to know how to spell Connecticut, you see, they will make efforts to look it up. Or, failing that, if a book announcing itself as The Only Way to Spell Connecticut is This is to be found in heaps on a table in front of them, they will think, “Hang on, I might get this!” But it turns out there are people whom you simply cannot help, because it suits them to say, with a shrug, “Do you know, I’ve always wanted to know how to use an apostrophe—and oh dear, I don’t know how to wash my hair either.” The fact that these people are sometimes editors of national newspapers and Oxbridge intellectuals is just an indication of how low our society’s intellectual aspirations have sunk.
It is customary in the UK, incidentally, to blame all examples of language erosion on the pernicious influence of the US. Certainly American spellings are creeping in to our shop signs (GLAMOR GIRL! I noticed in a huge chain pharmacy over Christmas—where it ought to have been “Glamour” with a “u”). But in the case of our deteriorating understanding of commas and apostrophes, we have no one to blame but ourselves. While significant variations exist between British and American usage, these are matters for quite rarefied concern. You say “parentheses” while we say “brackets” (see page ref)—but to people who call an apostrophe “one of them floating comma things” it doesn’t matter very much. They are unlikely to spot that American usage interestingly places all terminal punctuation inside closing quotation marks, while British usage sometimes “picks and chooses”. (Like that.) People who identify “that dot-thing” as the mark at the end of a sentence probably don’t care that the American “period” is the equivalent of the British “full stop”, or that “exclamation point” is the US way of saying “exclamation mark”. We probably don’t use the term “inverted commas” as much as