Well, my Christmas shopping is done: one copy of this for everyone, even if it does have to come from Great Britain. We dare not wait for the U.S. edition.
A book about the serial abuse of apostrophes and commas... has become a surprise Christmas bestseller.Eats, Shoots & Leaves (subtitled The Zero Tolerance Approach To Punctuation) chronicles "the mind-bogglingly depressing misuse of the apostrophe". Last night it was the number one bestseller on the Amazon.co.uk chart - a position usually reserved for thrillers or books about boy wizards.
The author, Lynne Truss, said yesterday that she felt moved to describe the feeling of being "an isolated nerd" because the sight of a misplaced apostrophe or absent comma made her feel irritated, and occasionally violent.
Miss Truss, a writer and broadcaster whose war against bad grammar began during her days as a newspaper sub-editor, said: "The main impetus was that I really did want to write about that feeling that the isolated nerd has."
She feels tortured on a regular basis by sightings of signs for Mens Toilets and Pupil's Entrance, but is usually too frightened to say anything as reactions to correction are rarely appreciative.
And that strange title? It derives from...
one of Miss Truss's favourite jokes. A panda goes into a bar, orders a sandwich, fires a gun and heads for the door."What was all that about?" asks the shaken barman.
"Look it up," says the panda, throwing him a badly-punctuated wildlife manual.
The barman turns to the relevant page. "Panda: Bear-like mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
Available from Amazon.co.uk
Posted by Alan at December 1, 2003 12:41 PM