Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

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Eats, Shoots & Leaves from Literature & Fiction

Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Available from Amazon
Price: $11.21
Updated on 6-30-2008.

Features

Audio CD: 70 pages

Publisher: Penguin Audio; Unabridged edition (April 22, 2004)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0142800821

ISBN-13: 978-0142800829

Product Dimensions: 5.6 x 4.8 x 0.4 inches

Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces ()

From Publishers Weekly
Who would have thought a book about punctuation could cause such a sensation? Certainly not its modest if indignant author, who began her surprise hit motivated by "horror" and "despair" at the current state of British usage: ungrammatical signs ("BOB,S PETS"), headlines ("DEAD SONS PHOTOS MAY BE RELEASED") and band names ("Hear'Say") drove journalist and novelist Truss absolutely batty. But this spirited and wittily instructional little volume, which was a U.K. #1 bestseller, is not a grammar book, Truss insists; like a self-help volume, it "gives you permission to love punctuation." Her approach falls between the descriptive and prescriptive schools of grammar study, but is closer, perhaps, to the latter. (A self-professed "stickler," Truss recommends that anyone putting an apostrophe in a possessive "its"-as in "the dog chewed it's bone"-should be struck by lightning and chopped to bits.) Employing a chatty tone that ranges from pleasant rant to gentle lecture to bemused dismay, Truss dissects common errors that grammar mavens have long deplored (often, as she readily points out, in isolation) and makes elegant arguments for increased attention to punctuation correctness: "without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning." Interspersing her lessons with bits of history (the apostrophe dates from the 16th century; the first semicolon appeared in 1494) and plenty of wit, Truss serves up delightful, unabashedly strict and sometimes snobby little book, with cheery Britishisms ("Lawks-a-mussy!") dotting pages that express a more international righteous indignation.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From AudioFile
Oh, to be in England. Or rather, oh, to have quotidian access to BBC4 radio productions such as "Cutting a Dash," the hit series about punctuation that inspired the hit book EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES. Thank goodness all six episodes are available as a classy audio production. Swinging jazz riffs introduce each segment; background noises color scenes set on city streets and in children's classrooms; and through it all, the crisp, humor-filled voice of comedy writer/literary editor Lynne Truss gives us permission to laugh aloud while being shocked, yes shocked, about the disastrous state of punctuation and grammar in the modern world. Notice my use of the semicolon, a punctuation mark that Truss has caused me to reconsider. I have learned that Greek dramatists gave the world the comma, colon, and period; that the second comma in that string is known as an Oxford comma; and that it incites much debate. I have also learned that society's overuse of the apostrophe may indicate its imminent demise. So, I plan to join Sticklers United to fight punctuation-imprecision and to play my copy of EATS, SHOOTS & LEAVES until it wears out. A.C.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (Hardcover) It is a good thing that a book on punctuation is a best-seller; it's just a pity it's this one. All the good work Lynne Truss does in conveying her message (viz., punctuation matters) is undone by her hectoring tone, dismal attempts at humour (made worse by a tendency to point out the punch-lines) and, in the final analysis, lack of credibility: having set out rules she then reverses over them, makes egregious appeals to authority and, every now and then, just gets things flat out wrong. You might forgive that were there any humility in her prose, but there isn't. The first rule of hubris is: if you're going to be a clever-clogs, make sure you're right, because readers won't cut you any slack if you're not. Lynne Truss isn't always right. A case in point: in her introduction, Truss states (rather presumptuously) on behalf of her fellow sticklers, "we got very worked up after 9/11 not because of Osama bin-Laden but because people on the radio kept saying "enormity" when they meant "magnitude", and we hate that". Now ignoring the curious impression this creates of Truss's value scheme, she is quite wrong to take umbrage here: "Enormity", in British English, means "extreme wickedness". The magnitude and the awfulness of an act of mass murder are closely correlated. So, even in British English, it is perfectly right to talk of the "enormity" of September 11. But if any of the voices Truss heard on the radio were American, they had another excuse. In American English enormity *does* mean "magnitude". Since Truss is so enamoured with appeals to authority, it is odd she didn't check that with the best authority on American English, Webster's dictionary. I should mention that I read English edition of this book. Given Truss's proclivities as regards the cultural heathen, it will be interesting to see whether her American sub-editors pluck up enough courage to point this out. When she does make them, Truss's appeals to authority are even more irritating, particularly where they contradict her own rules or justify her own errors: So, the author patiently explains that an apostrophe is required to indicate possession except in the case of a possessive pronoun (i.e., "mine", "yours", "his", "hers", "its", "ours" and "theirs"). Now, I had always wondered why a possessive "its" doesn't have an apostrophe, and this explains it nicely. But then Truss completely undermines her own rule and appeals to the authority of Virginia Woolf: "Someone wrote to say that my use of "one's" was wrong ("a common error"), and that it should be "ones". This is such rubbish that I refuse to argue about it. Go and tell Virginia Woolf it should be "A Room of Ones Own" and see how far you get." Virginia Woolf's been dead for over fifty years, so this is pretty tough to do. But it doesn't mean Virginia Woolf was right. And Truss fails explain why this is "such rubbish". Finally, even the book's title betrays the author's questionable sense of humour. I don't think she gets the joke. It has nothing to do with waiters or pistols (perhaps a maiden aunt told her that one?) and certainly doesn't need a "badly punctuated wildlife manual" to work, because it isn't a grammatical play; it's an oral one. The joke doesn't work when you write it down, precisely because of the ambiguous comma. You have to say it out loud (in spoken English, there is no punctuation at all). I hope they re-title the New Zealand edition of this book, because the local version of the joke (which employs a delightful expression from NZ English) is funnier: The Kiwi, it is said, is the most anti-social bird in the bush, and no-one likes to invite it to parties, because, if it turns up at all, it just eats roots and leaves. The joke's about shagging, Lynne. Comments (13) | Permalink | (Report this)

Eats, Shoots & Leaves
List Price: $14.95
Available from Amazon
Price: $11.21
Updated on 6-30-2008.