Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [4]
My American correspondents, however, have made it pretty clear that the US is not immune to similar levels of public illiteracy. Carved in stone (in stone, mind you) in a Florida shopping mall one may see the splendidly apt quotation from Euripides, “Judge a tree from it’s fruit: not the leaves”—and it is all too easy to imagine the stone-mason dithering momentarily over that monumental apostrophe, mallet in hand, chisel poised. Can an apostrophe ever be wrong, he asks himself, as he answers “Nah!” and decisively strikes home and the chips fly out. Meanwhile a casual drive in America is quite as horrifying to a stickler as it is in the UK. CHILDRENS HOME; READERS OUTLET; PLEASE DO NOT LOCK THIS DOOR BETWEEN THE HOUR’S OF 9AM AND 6:30PM.
Might the tide turn, however? Are there any reasons to be cheerful on behalf of punctuation? Well, there is one—and although modesty ought to forbid me from mentioning it, it is the astonishing response Eats, Shoots & Leaves has had in the UK. Some may say that the British are obsessed with class difference and that knowing your apostrophes is a way of belittling the uneducated. To which accusation, I say (mainly), “Pah!” How can it be a matter of class difference when ignorance is universal? Why should it only be middle-class people who care about the language? I come personally from a working-class background. I went to a state school, and there are many street traders in my immediate family. Punctuation is no more a class issue than the air we breathe. It is a system of printers’ marks that has aided the clarity of the written word for the past half-millennium, and if its time has come to be replaced, let’s just use this moment to celebrate what an elegant and imaginative job it did while it had the chance. Caring about matters of language is unfortunately generally associated with small-minded people, but that doesn’t make it a small issue. The disappearance of punctuation (including word spacing, capital letters, and so on) indicates an enormous shift in our attitude to the written word, and nobody knows where it will end.
In the meantime, however, I suggest that we ponder the case of Defeatist Bookshop Woman, and consider what she must be like to live with. I may even have to write a fictional character based on her. I can see her now, holding up the queue at an ice-cream vendor, explaining her predicament: “If only one could get an ice cream from somewhere, but it’s hopeless!” Or standing outside Lincoln Center with a ticket labelled “Bolshoi” in her hand, saying, “If only I could see a ballet once in my life! But I suppose it’s not to be.”
* * *
Introduction – The Seventh Sense
Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t. A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near to where I live. “Come inside,” it says, “for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s.”
If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler; that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards; but just don’t bother to go any further. For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.
It’s tough being a stickler for punctuation these days. One almost dare not get up in the mornings. True, one occasionally hears a marvellous punctuation-fan joke about a panda who “eats, shoots and leaves”, but in general the stickler’s exquisite sensibilities are assaulted from all