Wednesday, January 14, 2004

By Samantha Bennett, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

This has probably happened to you: You're explaining some minor expertise you have, telling a story or passing on some lesson it has taken painful years to learn, and somebody says, "Wow! You should write a book." It may even be said, on rare occasions, without sarcasm.

And you think, "Hey, maybe I should. Except that, nah, nobody would want to read a book about that. Nobody would publish it, and nobody would pay for it. Hmph."

You go on with your obscure, underappreciated existence. And then you discover that somebody has gone and written that book.

If you are me, you discover that an Englishwoman has written the book and that it has inexplicably become a No. 1 best seller in the United Kingdom, with a half-million copies in print and buzz that would impress Harry Potter.

The book I should have written is called "Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation." It is, as the title suggests, an entire book about punctuation.

Now, the reason I never thought seriously about writing a book about punctuation is that I was pretty sure that, no matter how sparklingly it was written, such a book would inspire a printing run of eight copies, seven of which would remain unsold and be recycled into greeting cards printed with soy ink.

(The eighth would be purchased by my mother.)

I still console myself that this book won't sell in the United States. We'll find out when it is published here in April, but I suspect that the English care much more about the language they gave the world than we do, even though they misuse it, too.

British grocers advertise "carrot's and banana's" and British employee handbooks may threaten "a weeks suspension." They, too, put commas where they don't belong and withhold them where they do.

Our trans-Atlantic cousins are very nearly as lazy with the language as we are, except that they are actually buying this book. They may even be reading it.

No one is more surprised than Lynne Truss, the author, a 48-year-old former magazine copy editor. Copy editors are all about punctuation, as well as spelling and grammar. We care deeply about this stuff, because we spend our days sitting at drab desks in filthy newsrooms, watching reporters and photographers breeze in and out while we eat Styrofoam meals in a cloud of fruit flies. If we didn't secretly believe we were the last defense against the forces of barbarism, we would lose the will to live.

So Truss wrote this little book, which everyone very sensibly told her she shouldn't waste a lot of time on because, you know, nobody was going to read it. And it was a HUGE success. It turns out that while getting "it's" and "its" straightened out may seem trivial, people do realize there is a big difference between "extra-marital sex" and "extra marital sex."

Also, the book is small, cute, nonthreatening and written with passion but without preachiness, which is very important when you're telling people what they're doing wrong. The title comes from a joke about a panda who fires a gun in a cafe and, on his way out, shows a wildlife manual with the description "Eats, shoots and leaves" rather than "Eats shoots and leaves." Moral: Pandas don't kill people, commas kill people.

While that punchline does not illustrate a common or even very plausible error, it does show that these piddling little squiggly marks are not completely without meaning. One comma has the power to change everything.

(Another clumsy example of the power of punctuation is the story about students who are asked to punctuate "Woman without her man is nothing." The men write "Woman, without her man, is nothing," while the women write "Woman: Without her, man is nothing." Yeah, the panda joke is cuter.)

This book may not stop families from hanging signs on their porches that say "The Robinson's," but we can hope.

Though "Eats, Shoots ..." won't be published here until April, it's available on amazon.co.uk, where it costs 6 pounds 99 pence and has garnered many glowing reviews from buyers.

They find it hilariously funny and engaging, though a writer from The Guardian dismissed its "overheated whimsy."

I suspect he, too, is sorry he didn't write it.

Samantha Bennett can be reached at sbennett@post-gazette.com or 412-263-3572.

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