Sunday, November 20, 2005

A book and a joke

Saw this article about a book in the NYT and I liked the joke about the Panda.

"Truss, a self-described stickler, a woman incensed by the gratuitous apostrophes in grocery-store signs that say "Apple's for Sale" or "We Have Lemon's and Lime's and Video's," had achieved the not inconsiderable feat of making punctuation hot. She turned the apostrophe into a form of mass entertainment.

"Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation" went on to sell some three million copies in hardcover. It fared well even in foreign languages, including Japanese and Swedish, the go-to grammar book for those studying English as a second language. In America, the book easily held its own against "Harry Potter," diet books and the plethora of pre-election screeds, remaining on the New York Times best-seller list for 44 weeks.

The book's title, by the way, refers to a joke about a panda that walks into a cafe. He eats a sandwich, fires a pistol into the air and then leaves. On his way out, he tosses a wildlife handbook at a bewildered waiter, who understands everything when he turns to the section marked "panda" and notices a grievously misplaced comma: "Eats, shoots and leaves."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

No fewer than eight people offered to get me that book for my birthday last year when it first appeared---can't imagine why! Oddly, it's an inconsistently punctuated book itself, and it makes one realize the risks (not to say the sheer pathetic-ness) of committing one's long-standing grammatical rants to paper. But I love the panda joke. (This reminds me that the San Diego Zoo has a new panda baby, whose Chinese name translates to "A Little Bit of Something Very Cute." Punctuate that as you like!)

amy said...

You can imagine that this post was partly dedicated to you, Lizard, the Grammer Queen herself!!!! And I love that name of the SD panda!!!