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Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Fri., February 24, 2006

Cover for 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves.'I wrapped up reading Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which one of you got me for Christmas or my birthday or something. It’s not bad; it’s not strictly a “language book,” like Simon Winchester’s excellent The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary, and it’s not strictly a guide like Strunk & White’s classic Elements of Style, but a blend of both. This means it’s a fun read, but that I’m unlikely to refer to it as a reference, even though it somewhat attempts to be one.

Yet she’s able to turn a confusing system into something of humor and interest. She’s what would be known among readers of William Safire’s “On Language” column as a member of the “Gotcha Gang.” She takes pride in spotting examples of bad grammar in public and sharing it with others, alerting the signmaker or merchant, or correcting it herself—in the photo on the book’s dust jacket, she is poised, marker uncapped and ready to add an apostrophe to a Two Weeks Notice movie poster.

I enjoyed her capsule histories of each punctuation mark and her cheeky, learned citations, everything from James Thurber’s eternal comma wrangling with his editor Harold Ross, to Dorothy Parker’s denunciation of more or less every mark of punctuation. There are copious self-referential examples of correct usage, many featuring Opal Fruits, also known as Starburst.

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