Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (for translation see section title ) is a non-fiction book by the Englishwoman Lynne Truss , the former presenter of the BBC radio show Cutting a dash - a radio show on the subject of punctuation . In the book, published in 2003, Truss laments the state of punctuation in the UK and the US and describes how the rules are being relaxed in society today. Her aim is to use a mixture of humor and explanation to remind readers of the importance of punctuation in the English language . Truss dedicates her book to "the memory of the Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg , who in 1905 demanded the same payment for punctuation marks as for letters and thus directlyinitiatedthe first Russian revolution ".

overview

There is a chapter on apostrophes and commas , one on dashes and colons , one on exclamation marks , question marks and quotation marks , italics , dashes , brackets , ellipses and emoticons, and one on hyphens . Truss touches on different aspects of the history of punctuation and includes a few anecdotes that add another layer to its explanations and grammar rules. In the last chapter of the book, she explains the importance of upholding the rules of punctuation and the harmful effects of e-mail and the Internet on punctuation.

The Irish-American writer and author of My Mother's Ashes , Frank McCourt , penned the preface to the US edition of Eats, Shoots & Leaves . In it he praised Truss for bringing life back to punctuation; he begins with the words: "If Lynne Truss were Roman Catholic, I would propose her for canonization."

The book was a huge commercial success. In 2004 the US edition became the New York Times bestseller.

title

The title of the book is a play on words . More specifically, it is a verbal deception created by an ambiguous grammatical construction that comes from a joke about bad punctuation.

“A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.
'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
'Well, I'm a panda', he says, at the door. 'Look it up.'
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats , shoots and leaves. '”

“A panda comes into the café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and opens fire on the other guests.
,Why?' asks the confused waiter, who survived, from the middle of the bloodbath while the panda makes his way to the exit. The panda takes out a poorly punctuated wildlife guide and tosses it over his shoulder.
'Well, I'm a panda,' he said at the door. 'Look it up.'
The waiter opens the relevant entry in the manual and actually finds an explanation. ,Panda. Large, black and white, bear-like mammal native to China. Eat, shoot and walk away . '"

Explanation

Due to incorrect punctuation in the last sentence (shown in italics), the sense of the sentence first grasped by the reader deviates completely from what the author actually meant with it. The actual meaning of the sentence would be "eats shoots and leaves (leaves; Pl. Von leaf)". By inserting a comma after the word "eats" (shown in bold in the original text), the sentence reads as "Eats, shoots ('shoots' as the 3rd person singular from 'to shoot' - to shoot) and goes away ('leaves' here as the 3rd person singular of 'to leave' - go away) ”.

criticism

In a 2004 review, Louis Menand of The New Yorker magazine pointed out a number of punctuation errors in the book, including one in the dedication, and wrote: “An Englishwoman who lectures Americans on semicolons is like a American lecturing the French about sauces. Some of Truss 'deviations from the punctuation rules are just British casualness. ”Truss' book has also been criticized and ridiculed on the popular linguistic blog Language Log .

A parody of Eats, Shoots & Leaves titled Eats, Shites & Leaves: Crap English and How to Use it by “A. Parody ”was published in 2004 by Michael O'Meara Books Limited in the UK.

In The Fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot and left (OUP 2006; for example "The fight for English: How language gurus ate, shot and walked away"), the linguist David Crystal criticizes the very unsettling zero tolerance for punctuation of, which is based on incomprehension Truss and other advocates of language purism .

In 2006, English professor Nicholas Waters published his book Eats, Roots & Leaves , in which he criticized the "grammar fascists" who "want to prevent language from entering the 21st century".

expenditure

Lynne Truss: Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Profile Books, London 2003, ISBN 1-86197-612-7 (UK hardcover)
Lynne Truss: Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Gotham Books, New York 2004, ISBN 1-59240-087-6 (US hardcover)
Lynne Truss: Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Profile Books, London 2004, ISBN 1-86197-612-7 (Paperback, Special Indian Edition)
Lynne Truss: This is what everyone is looking for - Eats, Shoots and Leaves - strong punctuation. Translated from English and supplemented by Käthe H. Fleckenstein. Authors' House Publishing House, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-932909-32-1 .

Individual evidence

^ Bad Comma: Lynne Truss's strange grammar by Louis Menand , The New Yorker , June 28, 2004 .

^ Language Log . For a list of posts referring to Truss, see this page ( Memento of the original from November 21, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . @1@ 2