Interviews
A Message from the Author
At first glance, punctuation looks like a pretty small subject, I admit. When I first started to tell people I was writing a funny book about it, the reaction was generally the same: a puzzled frown, a pat on the shoulder, and the caring question, "You know this is commercial suicide?"
What is there to say about punctuation, after all (they said)? It is merely a set of conventional printers' marks which notate the written word. These marks are small; nobody under the age of thirty knows how to use them anymore; many sensible people are advocating that we drop them altogether. Worst of all, punctuation is so old-fashioned! If you go around publicly defending the apostrophe, for Pete's sake (they continued, their voices rising), don't you realize how uncool you'll be?
Whether I was wise to ignore these warnings only time will truly tell. I went ahead and wrote my book on punctuation anyway -- and, blimey! In the UK alone it has sold half a million copies in three months! Why? Well, I have three theories. First, punctuation is self-evidently in peril (look around and you will find cards printed with SEASONS GREETING'S, signs to MENS ROOM, films called TWO WEEKS NOTICE) -- and it turns out that there are millions of sensitive (older) people who feel actual pain when they are forced to swallow such illiterate stuff. Second, bad teaching of grammar has left a generation of clever young people clueless about how to use the written word correctly -- so they turn to Eats, Shoots & Leaves for painless instruction. Third, buyers think it is actually about pandas and are too embarrassed to take it back when they realize their mistake.
There have been many grammatical books about punctuation before, of course. The difference with Eats, Shoots & Leaves is that it's a mixture of essay, polemic, history and grammar, with the main emphasis on stories about James Thurber and Harold Ross at The New Yorker threatening each other with ash-trays over the second comma in "Red, white, and blue." Punctuation turns out to be a far from anodyne subject. Nicholson Baker eulogizes the "commash" (comma with a dash); George Orwell loathes the semicolon; Gertrude Stein abominates every punctuation mark you can think of. And people have died because of punctuation, it turns out. In 1916, the Irish insurrectionist Sir Roger Casement was "hanged on a comma" (the punctuation of the 1351 Act of Treason being decisive in his death sentence). Meanwhile, at the more trivial end of things, a member of a New England reading group once delightfully misplaced Shakespeare's punctuation so that King Duncan, in Macbeth, listened to the words of the wounded soldier in Act One and then announced with relish, "Go get him, surgeons!" (It's supposed to be "Go, get him surgeons.")
Does punctuation matter? I think so. And I think its demise is just the most obvious manifestation of a growing -- and overwhelmingly depressing -- disrespect for precision in language. By a tragic coincidence, understanding of the traditional techniques of the written word has plummeted just at the point when -- with the Internet, email, and text messaging -- people are writing more than ever before. Of course there are good arguments for abandoning old printers' marks in this context. But at the same time as I reluctantly acknowledge that language must move on, I'm so glad that it occurred to me to look at punctuation and celebrate it before it goes. It is a wonderful system, you see. It is elegant and simple; both an art and a science. Its purpose is to "tango the reader into the pauses, inflections, continuities and connections that the spoken line would convey."
There is a panda on the cover because of the fine panda joke that gave rise to the title, yet perhaps there was more than serendipity in the way our black-and-white friend reminds us that punctuation is a truly endangered species. Sometimes I feel like a lone explorer who has discovered Venice just on the point of it sinking into the lagoon, and is frantically taking pictures of it from every angle, saying, "But it's so beautiful! Look at the way the water reflects on that canal wall! The domes! The Campanile! The gondolas! Yes, Venice is old-fashioned (and shaped like a comma, as it happens), but what a shame it all has to go this way!"
--Lynne Truss
