While travelling recently, I did a lot of reading. Men that stand six foot, nine inches tall have problems sleeping comfortably on airplanes, so there is little else to do. One of the books I picked up was Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. Those familiar with the panda joke will recognize this as being a book about punctuation. The prose is witty and enlightening. It is strongly grounded in the literary traditions of the english language and the necessity of change and growth in a living language. The author asserts that this is a book for sticklers, but on this point I firmly disaggree: Eats, Shoots & Leaves is for everyone with any interest in writing or reading. Even for those who read only when compelled to do so. The following is taken from a chapter entitled “Airs and Graces:”

Assuming a sentence rises into the air with the initial capital letter and lands with a soft-ish bump at the full stop, the humble comma can keep the sentence aloft all right, like this, UP, for hours if necessary, UP, like this, UP, sort-of bouncing, and then falling down, and then UP it goes again, assuming you have enough additional things to say, although in the end you may run out of ideas and then you have to roll along the ground with no commas at all until some sort of surface resistance takes over and you run out of steam anyway and then eventually with the help of three dots … you stop.

Some wankers would argue that the above quote was improperly punctuated; however the overcapitalized “ups” and the uneven distribution of commas serve a clear stylistic purpose. Style has a place in our written language. It is nice to see Ms. Truss fighting hard to keep it there. Now I think I’ll go sequester myself for a few days and re-edit my previous entries, which I suspect are absolutely horrible…