Explains, quotes, and dashes!
HOW DO YOU SELL a punctuation guide to nearly half a million Britons? Make `em laugh - it worked for Lynn Truss, whose ``Eats, Shoots & Leaves'' arrives in US bookstores early next month. As the title suggests (it's based on a joke about a panda who goes into a bar and does what a mispunctuated wildlife manual says pandas do), Truss brings a droll sensibility to that driest of topics, the proper deployment of commas and dashes.
Tired of seeing its and it's confused? So is Truss, and she claims to believe we can all master the simple distinction between the possessive and the contraction. But she doesn't, truth be told, offer much evidence for such optimism. What she does, instead, is pile up examples of apostrophe abuse - layering in some bits of history, to keep things in perspective - till the stickler's sense of mounting grievance collapses into hilarity.
The ``greengrocer's apostrophe,'' for instance - named for its prevalence at produce stalls offering melon's and potato's and lemon's - is a major source of annoyance to the punctuation police. But had these sins not been committed, Truss would never have heard from the Somerset man who ``cringed regularly at a sign on a market garden'' until he learned that the owner was one R. Carrott - which was why the establishment's sign always had ``Carrott's'' at the top. For Truss, punctuation is like life: If everything went as it ought to, we'd have far less to laugh at.
There's a serious side to punctuation, too, of course. It's not quite true, as the legend has it, that an Irishman convicted of treason in World War I was ``hanged on a comma,'' though lawyers in the case did wrangle over the parsing of the relevant statute. But Biblical scholars, says Truss, are at odds over punctuating Jesus' words to the thief on the cross beside him: Is it ``Verily, I say unto thee, This day thou shalt be with me in Paradise,'' or ``Verily I say unto thee this day. . ..''? One version leaves theological space for Purgatory, it seems, while the other zooms right past it.
Still, Truss doesn't overstate the gravity of her subject; she's a reformer with the soul of a stand-up comedian. ``Martin Amis included just one semicolon in `Money' (1984), and was afterward (more than usually) pleased with himself,'' she observes, demonstrating her proficiency with the parenthesis. ``The big final rule for the comma,'' she declares, is simple. ``The rule is: don't use commas like a stupid person.''
And though her rallying cry is ``Sticklers unite!'' Truss can see there's not much hope. Sticklers ``are the worst people for finding common cause because it is in their nature (obviously) to pick holes.'' Quite so: This stickler found several nits to pick. There's a shady equivocation over commas in coordinate clauses (you'll find it), something missing in a sentence on page 58, and an erroneous claim that American style calls for apostrophes in plurals like MD's and 1980's.
More seriously, Truss works over the apostrophe and the comma so thoroughly in early chapters that she seems a bit spent by the second half. Colons and semicolons are treated decently, but dashes, brackets, question marks, and quotation marks are jumbled into a grab bag of a chapter, and the subtleties of the hyphen are sadly neglected. Truss takes up the suspensive hyphen (``He was a two- or three-year-old), but not the hyphenated modifiers often mistakenly rendered as a suspensive hyphen (it's ``18-to-34-year-old consumers,'' a continuous swath, not ``18- to 34-year-olds'').
Truss even claims, rashly, that the hyphen is dying. Not here in these United States, it's not: Four out of five American editors would add a hyphen to her book's subtitle, ``The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.'' Copy editors who once knew better now routinely add superfluous hyphens to modifying phrases like ``more-specific'' and ``less-important.''
And despite a passing mention of ``graphic frivolity,'' Truss doesn't delve into the rich subject of designers' influence on punctuation: It's a fair bet that one of her prime irritants, the movie title ``Two Weeks Notice,'' lacks its apostrophe (it should be ``Two Weeks' Notice'') because a graphic designer didn't want to clutter up that nice clean title.
There's also a chapter waiting to be written about fake foreign accents, a la Haagen-Dazs; my favorite of the season comes from a shop in my neighborhood claiming its wares are CHIC. These cavils, though, only show that there is more material ripe for the Lynn Truss treatment. Sticklers unite, indeed: We may never reach consensus on where the commas belong, but we can learn to laugh through the pain.
E-mail freeman@globe.com. For a month's worth of The Word, visit www.boston.com/ideas/freeman.
