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The zero tolerance approach to punctuation

By Paul Majendie

London - In the land of Shakespeare, punctuation faced extinction until writer Lynne Truss came to the rescue with a clutch of carefully placed commas and colons.

Taking a zero tolerance approach to grammatical lapses, she wrote a sprightly guide to punctuation, Eats, Shoots And Leaves, that has sold more than half a million copies in Britain alone and soared to the top of bestseller lists.

Now, honing her crusading zeal over misplaced apostrophes, Truss is off to the United States to ensure transatlantic tidiness reigns supreme on the printed page.

She fervently believes the Internet, emails and text messaging have widened people's horizons, but treat punctuation like unnecessary linguistic baggage.

Truss, who says she is a stickler for accuracy and not an obsessive pedant, thinks the English have lost touch with the language they invented and gave to the world.

But she will not cast the first stone at the Americans, often mocked by the haughty British for bastardising their mother tongue.

"American education seems to take grammar quite seriously," she said before leaving on a 10-city, coast-to-coast tour of North America for the launch of the book there next month.

"My sense of it is that British English is worse actually than American English. I think Americans really like rules. I think we in Britain are very slapdash and don't care if we are right or wrong."

But Hollywood has certainly enraged Truss, a feisty columnist and broadcaster who would happily reach for her marker pen to put in punctuation where Tinseltown offers none.

"What about that film Two Weeks Notice? Where was the apostrophe?" she asks, enraged that there is no apostrophe at the end of Weeks.

The rise of the manufactured British pop band Hear'Say had her apoplectic with grammatical rage and she rejoiced when "the group thankfully folded within 18 months".

"Valentine's Day was a terrible time for me too," she said. "Only half the shops put the apostrophe in. That was upsetting."

Now it looks like her punctuation campaign could go global.

"The book is out in the Gulf states. There is a separate edition in India. It has done well in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It does seem to be touching a chord," she said.

"It is an international issue. The Internet is having a big effect on the way people write in every language."

Truss insists that punctuation vigilantes are not nerds who should really get out more.

"We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation," she said.

For, as she explains in "Eats, Shoots and Leaves", published in Britain by Profile Books, a misplaced comma can indeed be deadly.

The book's title stems from the joke about a panda who walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots into the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter as the panda heads for the exit. The animal produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and all is revealed.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."