June 29, 2009
Converse to my experience when reading Simon Winchester’s The Meaning of Everything (people would look at the sepia-toned cover and think I was a learned nerd; notwithstanding the accuracy of the nerd part, it was galling, etc), reading Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves was conducive to some fairly different interactions with other members of society. Nothing to do with the gung-ho ‘punctuation warrior’ approach Truss espouses in the book, but it did bring on an unexpected encounter with a stranger on a tram. The fellow, older than I (and I suspect, quite inebriated), pointed at the cover and commented that his nickname at university had been ‘Wombat’, because he ‘eats, roots and leaves’. Pretty good. Amused by this anecdote, I humoured his desire for conversation. I was in the middle of telling him that he should encourage his son to learn languages from as young an age as possible when he fell asleep. Literally, actually, does-this-actually-happen fell asleep. Oh well. A friendship bites the dust.
I am sure that Truss would like this anecdote. She has a great sense of humour, though that sense of humour is often displayed in conjunction with an alarmingly violent distaste for incorrect use of punctuation marks. Eats, Shoots and Leaves (the title refers to a panda-walks-into-a-bar joke) reminds me how important voice is in non-fiction. Truss is a scampish vigilante who would be lots of fun at a dinner party, and the book comes with punctuation stickers which she exhorts her fellow guerillas to use in the quest for perfect public punctuation. Though not a ‘grammarian’, she’s sought help from old sovereigns of the English language, such as Amis, Burchfield, Fowler and Bryson.
Our friend Truss rightly points out that exacting standards in punctuation can be important beyond their usual vocation in alerting our companions to how educated we are. Take a look at the difference between the following expressions of a Bible passage (Isaiah, xl, 3):
“Comfort ye my people” (please go out and comfort my people)and“Comfort ye, my people” (just cheer up, you lot; it might never happen)
Doctrinal differences, indeed. I don’t think I had many doctrinal differences with Truss; she keeps it pretty simple. There are five chapters dealing with punctuation marks themselves: the comma, the apostrophe and the sub-editor’s nightmare, the hyphen, each get a chapter of its own; while the colon and semicolon share a chapter (in which Truss ashamedly entrusts us with an anecdote about her 14-year-old self trying to intellectually best an American penpal by using the word ‘desultory’, as well as throwing a colon in for good measure). A fourth chapter brings these guys: ! ? ‘ together with the dash and italics.
It’s really entertaining, and classic ‘I’m learning, but I’m having too much fun to realise I’m learning!’ stuff. Truss’s examples of how punctuation can finely mould the meaning of strings of words are often hilarious, and they’re also balanced with the recognition that once you’ve got all the rules down pat, you can kind of fling them away in a judicious manner if the flinging-away serves to make your writing more tasty.
Worth noting is the fact that this is a British book, and for reasons I’ve previously discussed (also strenously and disapprovingly pointed out by Louis Menand in his review for The New Yorker here) Eats, Shoots and Leaves is relevant only to the practice of British writers. It’s okay for Australians too, as we’re fairly British-leaning and non-standardised in our punctuation usage. Some of Menand’s, uh, crispy comments:
The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are. An Englishwoman lecturing Americans on semicolons is a little like an American lecturing the French on sauces. Some of Truss’s departures from punctuation norms are just British laxness. In a book that pretends to be all about firmness, though, this is not a good excuse. The main rule in grammatical form is to stick to whatever rules you start out with, and the most objectionable thing about Truss’s writing is its inconsistency. Either Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor. Still, the book has been a No. 1 best-seller in both England and the United States.
Oh dear – maybe he knew the American penpal. It’s true that there are trip-ups in the book, and it’s true that the book isn’t really a style manual: it’s more of a researched monologic extravaganza. But I’m okay with that, for some reason. It’s really fun. But the one thing I did not like was the final chapter, which bemoans the impending ‘intellectual impoverishment’ we invite if we allow ‘proper’ punctuation to go the way of the dodo because of swifter, less considered communications on the internet. This kind of talk has dated horribly since 2003, and there’s a cringeworthy section in which Truss ridicules emoticons. This part is overlong, lecturey and therefore a bit boring – it could be revised or cut out for future editions. Also, I happen not to agree with most of her assertions, and the niche-filling weight of now widespread e-conventions makes her rant look a bit silly.
Time to wind this bad boy up. In a nutshell: basic, super fun, not without its faults, but I’d date it.
