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Reviews

 Before engaging in any discussion, let me say straight away that this delightful little book is a must read. It has always been my impression that the keeper of Standard English and the bastion of proper usage and grammar was alive and well in England, the homeland, the source of the argot we utter in America. Accordingly, I was somewhat dismayed to read Lynne Truss’ report that such is not the case, for usage and Standard English suffers there too with common errors abundant with people who don’t know their colons from their elbows. I concur whole-heartedly with the author that something must be done, for apparently this problem has reached epidemic proportions on both sides of the sea.

 The author makes her case that grammar and proper punctuation are important in the very title of the book. What if she were to have unpunctuated it as follows: Eats Shoots and Leaves. And we could all agree that people who don’t know how to use a comma are in a coma.

 It is heartening to hear that Truss’ book turned into a runaway best-seller in Britain, the Harry Potter of punctuation, as it were—someone must care about proper usage after all. Now the book is attempting to penetrate the American market, and I wish it every success. If I were she, I would send an autographed copy to the President of the United States for starters.

 With great anticipation of the delights in store, I began reading. My smile soon turned to puzzlement, then a frown, as I read error after error. This poor author didn’t seem to have a clue about the proper usage of a colon, not to mention a semicolon. Was this a book on proper usage or an oxymoron? I had highlighted over thirty mis-uses of the colon before I finally gave up and continued reading in disbelief. She wantonly employs semicolons with all manner of phrases, sentences, and incomplete expressions without any internal punctuation. Mrs. Roberts, my ninth grade grammar teacher, would have expired of apoplexy. Gasp, did I just read a comma splice? Yes, there it was for the whole world to see. Well, she must have a near-sighted editor. But the errors were compounding upon themselves the further I got into the text. Meanwhile, the text seemed to be in dire need of a “colondectomy.” Clearly, this author never would have passed one of my classes without some serious re-writes.

 When I finally got to the chapter on colons and semicolons, she seemed to have a pretty clear grasp of proper usage.  Her justification for improper colon usage was that it was all right to use a colon before any of her wonderful examples. Thus: she would use a colon like this. Arrrggghhh… (There was also an interesting discussion on the proper and improper usage of ellipses too, by the way.)

 As for the content, it is delightful, fraught with gems of how language and usage have evolved. Fascinating vignettes illustrate how things used to be and how they got to be where they are today. In some cases, the author offers conjectures on where language might be going, based on current trends. Unfortunately, I think, for the most part, she concludes that it is definitely going downhill. A large part of the blame may be attributed to email [she uses emails as singular by the way] and to electronic publishing, which allows any idiot to express himself/herself with the push of a button.

 Now, we all realize that there are definitely differences between British English and American English, and that allowances have to be made. Curiously, in many cases American English is more conservative in usage than the British. For instance, most American academicians would argue to retain the Oxford comma before the “and” in a series: The flag was red, white, and blue. Whereas, it’s perfectly acceptable in the UK to write, “The flag was red, white and blue.” And then there are those obvious spelling differences using an “s” instead of a “z” as in realize or merchandize or hybridize. And then the Brits always insert the "u” in words such as "colour," "behaviour," "flavour."  Brits drop the direct object before institutional words, e.g. “He graduated from university,” "She went to hospital.” Brits also have a problem of using collective nouns as plural: "The university are giving exams today;" instead of  "The university is giving exams today." But comma splices and omitting commas in compound sentences, come on? Using colons in constructions without a subject and a predicate, give me a break. Using semicolons in a series without internal punctuation, oh the very thought of it makes me shiver and shudder with punctuation paralysis.

 There are other conventions that are ignored as well in capitalization (capitalisation) and the use of hyphens for instance. The writer or the editor do not seem to know the difference between an en-dash and an em-dash. But when she blatantly admits to the whole world that she is an Apple Computer user, your sympathy goes out to her and new allowances must be made. You should see what one of my editors sends back to me after my beautiful, pristine text has been adulterated on a MAC. It is almost unrecognizable, particularly when it comes to dashes and hyphens. MACs should not be allowed in the literary world.

 The problem of inconsistencies with the way I think the world of punctuation should be and the author’s come more clearly into focus when she again freely admits for the whole world to hear that she has been trained as a journalist. I’m beginning to learn that journalists seem to throw the entire literary world, the academic world, and their conventions to the winds and invent their own rules for punctuation, capitalization, and even spelling. Who do they think they are? You cannot imagine how aghast I was when I got to the end of the text and encountered the “Bibliography.” It was unlike anything I had ever encountered before, as it flaunted any convention in my experience. Forget the Chicago Manual of Style, APA, and MLS. She has seemingly invented her own form of citation. Let us kindly remark that journalists are helping proper English usage to evolve as they ignore convention and confuse the public. “But my English teacher told me…” Forget about it.

 To make matters more confusing, I’d like to welcome you to the world where full stops are periods, inverted comma pairs are quotation marks, exclamation marks are exclamation points, round brackets are parentheses, and brace brackets are curly brackets. Curiously, apparently the full stop started off being called a period but morphed into the full stop and has gotten stuck there ever since in the UK; while in America we use the original term, another case of our conservatism. In the UK, there is some debate about how to pronounce  "/." "Slash" is frowned on by some, who suggest  "stroke" or "solidus." Would the back slash then be a back stroke? Sounds a bit natatorial from my perspective.  

The author points out that punctuation was originally intended as clues to orators when reading aloud on how long to make their pauses. It makes me wonder though if Brits might say something like “www full stop amazon full stop com”.

 The terminal punctuation of the last sentence brings up another matter concerning quotation marks. In America, it is a strict rule that the period always, no matter what, goes inside the quotation marks at the end of a sentence as does any other terminal punctuation such as an exclamation point or a question mark. The Brits, however, seem to be much more relaxed about this and allow it to fall wherever it may. I noticed, to my relief, that Truss almost always puts terminal punctuation inside the terminal quotation mark. However, she does make a well-supported case, and I concur, for use of terminal punctuation outside of the quotation marks. When the question is posed by the sentence rather than by the speaker, logic demands that the question mark go outside the quotation marks: Why didn’t Sophia see at once that his lordship doted on her “to the highest degree of distraction”?

 Here’s her rule, and I like it: When the punctuation relates to the quoted words, it goes inside the “inverted commas”; when it relates to the sentence, it goes outside. Unless, she says, you are in America.

 Her real fear is that that someday soon American trendy publishers may altogether do away with quotation marks in favor of the colon and the dash. Or worse yet, quotation marks or inverted comma pairs will be shipped abroad to America, split down the middle, and imported back to Britain as inverted commas. In other words, people will begin using confusing single quotation marks, which are no different from apostrophes and punctuation will be in an even greater mess—a messopotamia much like Iraq.

 In fact, I found her whole discussion of question marks fascinating. Did you know, for instance, that there was a time that question marks faced in the opposite direction if the question were rhetorical? Of course, we should all know that question marks are required for direct questions, but never for indirect questions. She blames the latter indiscretion on teenagers who seem to end every sentence with a question mark. You know? You know what I mean? She also reports that the Spanish Academia made Bill Gates promise not to do away with the upside question mark in his software at the beginning of a sentence, which has always made good sense to me.

 As a rule, I am opposed to viruses and think the people who design them are demented, unless they attack the IRS. But Truss’ proposal, I must admit, intrigues me and has my tacit approval. Surely you remember the little grammar book by Strunk and White. Well, she suggests that there should be a “strunkandwhite virus” that attacks grammatically incorrect email and returns it to senders for correction before being accepted. What a wonderful concept. I think I’m going to pretend that my computer has already been infected by the beta version. The trouble is that I know a lot of my email would be returned if such a virus ever did escape. 

 eBook Note

 If you download this book as an eBook from Palmdigital, you will be required to use the Palm Reader program, which is available for both Palms and Pocket PCs. You are allowed to use it for two weeks for free. Then you have your choice of purchasing it for $20 or you may continue to use it free, but many of its desirable aspects will be disabled, such as automatic scrolling. I enjoy using this program with its rich array of features such as its ability to change fonts, font sizes, background and text color, its speedy search engine, word lookup capability, highlighting in a variety of colors, and annotation. You can also apply an array of background themes or textures. You can even apply fully justification or right justification to the text. What you can’t do, and this drives me crazy, is copy and paste, which is a serious shortcoming and anti-academic, and a fault that I sincerely hope will be addressed in future versions. Another drawback is that users are unable to change the orientation of the screen within the program from portrait to landscape. However, I found that I could easily accomplish this with my Toshiba e805 because of its built in ability to re-orient the screen and to change resolutions. Palm Reader’s adjustable scrolling feature is handy and saves turning pages manually, even though there are a number of other ways to navigate.     

I found the formatting of this book to be of exceptional quality, and I think we have to thank the folks at Penguin Books for that. Sometimes the formatting in eBooks can drive the reader to distraction with inconsistencies and faulty layouts.