Panda Jokes

I just finished reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (Lynne Truss). I can't believe it took me this far into life to read it. It is a must-add to my library.

Aside from offering me my favorite quote about punctuation ("There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken."), Truss presented punctuation in a manner that made me proud to be what she called a "stickler." I have to admit, so many of the jokes hit home with me that I didn't understand how it became a best-seller. If there are so many people who enjoy this book, how can so many grammatical mistakes exist? Truss's voice and her humor probably draw in more readers than her subject matter of different approaches to commas and apostrophes on poles.

Although I am decently acquainted with the rules of punctuation that Truss discussed, I did not find the book reiterative; its purpose was to describe punctuation, rather than dictate its usage. If some of that description comes in the form of where quotation marks out to be placed, so be it. I have fun learning that colons used to be set apart with extra spaces (like this : see?) or that Henry Denham (a 16th century printer) wanted to use the mirror image of a question mark to indicate a rhetorical question. And while Truss has a thing for apostrophes, I am conducting a no-longer-so-secret love affair with the semicolon. She bemoans its falling from style; I rejoice whenever I can use one, while trying very very hard not to overuse them.

Truss ends her book crying doom for punctuation and blaming it on the Internet/texting. I generally get fed up with Doomsday predictions, but in this case, she tempered it with enough appreciation for descriptivism that I could stomach it. I am more than ready to join her army of Sharpie-armed punctuation vigilantes and might have to write a grammatical-based sequel to train my followers.