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Eats,
Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne
Truss Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Punchy Teachers, especially English teachers, will be
huge fans of Lynne Truss’ new book, Eats,
Shoots & Leaves. In this funny book, Truss tackles the challenges of
bringing the rules of punctuation to the attention of readers. When one
Executive Times reader and teacher asked me if I was planning to read this
book, I answered honestly that it was in queue. Based on his recommendation,
I moved it up, and I’m glad I did. Each chapter accomplishes several
objectives: the introduction of a punctuation mark in a humorous fashion; illustrations
of the misuse of the mark through hilarious examples; and clear and direct
guidance on how to use the mark properly. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of chapter titled, “The
Tractable Apostrophe,” pp. 35-54: In the spring of 2001 the ITV1 show Popstars manufactured a pop phenomenon for our times: a
singing group called Hear’Say. The announcement of
the Hear’Say name was quite a national occasion, as
I recall; people actually went out in very large numbers to buy their
records; meanwhile, newspapers, who insist on precision in matters of
address, at once learned to place Hear’Say’s apostrophe
correctly and attend to the proper spacing. To refer in print to this group
as Hearsay (one word) would be wrong, you see. To call it Hear-Say
(hyphenated) would show embarrassing ignorance of popular culture. And so it
came to pass that Hear’Say’s poor, oddly placed
little apostrophe was replicated everywhere and no one gave a moment’s
thought to its sufferings. No one saw the pity of its position, hanging there
in eternal meaninglessness, silently signalling to
those with eyes to see, “I’m a legitimate punctuation mark, get me out of
here.” Checking the Hear’Say website a couple of
years later, I discover that the only good news in this whole sorry saga was
that, well, basically, once Kym had left to marry
Jack in January 2002 — after rumours,
counter-rumours and official denials — the group thankfully folded within
eighteen months of its inception. Now, there are no laws against
imprisoning apostrophes and making them look daft. Cruelty to punctuation is
quite unlegislated: you can get away with pulling the legs off semicolons; shrivelling question marks on the garden path under a
powerful magnifying glass; you name it. But the naming of Hear’Say in 2001 was
nevertheless a significant milestone on the road to punctuation anarchy. As
we shall see, the tractable apostrophe has always done its proper jobs in our
language with enthusiasm and elegance, but it has never been taken seriously
enough; its talent for adaptability has been cruelly taken for granted; and
now, in an age of supreme graphic frivolity, we pay the price. Too many jobs
have been heaped on this tiny mark, and — far
from complaining — the
apostrophe has seemingly requested “More weight”, just like that martyrish old codger in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible,
when religious bigots in black hats with buckles on are subjecting him to
death by crushing. “More weight,” the apostrophe has bravely said — if ever more faintly. “More weight,” it
manages to whisper still. But I ask you: how much more abuse must the
apostrophe endure? Now that it’s on its last legs (and idiotic showbiz
promoters stick apostrophes in names for purely decorative purposes), isn’t
it time to recognise that the apostrophe needs our
help? The English language first picked up
the apostrophe in the 16th century. The word in Greek means “turning away”,
and hence “omission” or “elision”. In classical texts, it was used to mark
dropped letters, as in t’cius for “tertius”; and when English printers adopted it, this was
still its only function. Remember that comical pedant Holofernes
in Love’s Labour’s Lost saying, “You find not the apostraphas, and so miss the accent”? Well, no, of course
you don’t, nobody remembers anything said by that frightful bore, and we certainly
shan’t detain ourselves bothering to work out what he was driving at. All we
need to know is that, in Shakespeare’s time, an apostrophe indicated omitted
letters, which meant Hamlet could say with supreme apostrophic confidence:
“Fie on’t! O fie!”; “Tis
a consummation devoutly to be wish’d”; and even, “I
am too much i’ the sun” — the latter, incidentally, a clear case
of a writer employing a new-fangled punctuation mark entirely for the sake of
it, and condemning countless generations of serious long-haired actors to
adopt a knowing expression and say i’ — as if this actually added anything to the
meaning. If only the apostrophe’s life had
stayed that simple. At some point in the i7th century, however,
printers started to intrude an apostrophe before the “s” in singular
possessive cases (“the girl’s dress”), and from then on quite frankly the whole
thing has spiralled into madness. In the i8th
century, printers started to put it after plural possessives as well (“the
girls’ dresses”). Some historians of grammar claim, incidentally, that the
original possessive use of the apostrophe signified a contraction of the
historic “his”; and personally, I believed this attractive theory for many
years, simply on the basis of knowing Ben Jonson’s
play Sejanus, his Fall, and reasoning that this
was self-evidently halfway to “Sejanus’s Fall”. But
blow me, if there aren’t differences of opinion. There are other historians
of grammar who say this Love-His-Labour-Is-Lost
explanation is ignorant conjecture and should be forgotten as soon as heard.
Certainly the Henry-His-Wives (Henry’s Wives) rationalisation
falls down noticeably when applied to female possessives, because “Elizabeth
Her Reign” would have ended up logically as “Elizabeth’r
Reign”, which would have had the regrettable result ofmaking
people sound a) a bit stupid, b) a bit drunk, or c) a bit from the West
Country. So what are the jobs an apostrophe
currently has on its CV? Before we start tearing out our hair at sloppy,
ignorant current usage, first let us acknowledge the sobering wisdom of the
Oxford Companion to English Literature: “There never was a golden age in
which the rules for the possessive apostrophe were clear-cut and known,
understood and followed by most educated people.” And then let us check that
we know the rules of what modern grammarians call “possessive determiners”
and “possessive pronouns” — none
of which requires an
apostrophe.
Possessive determiners my our your your his their her their its their Possessive pronouns mine ours yours yours his theirs hers theirs
And now, let us just count the various important tasks the apostrophe
is obliged to execute every day. 1 It
indicates a possessive in a singular noun: The boy’s hat The
First Lord of the Admiralty’s rather smart front door This seems simple. But not so fast,
Batman. When the possessor is plural, but does not end in an “s”, the
apostrophe similarly precedes the “s”: The
children’s playground The
women’s movement But
when the possessor is a regular plural, the apostrophe follows the “S”: The
boys’ hats (more than one boy) The babies’
bibs I apologise
if you know all this, but the point is many, many people do not. Why else
would they open a large play area for children, hang up a sign saying “Giant
Kid’s Playground”, and then wonder why everyone stays away from it? (Answer:
everyone is scared of the Giant Kid.) 2 It
indicates time or quantity: In one week’s
time Four yards’
worth Two weeks’ notice (Warner Brothers,
take note) 3 It
indicates the omission of figures in dates: The summer of’68 4 It
indicates the omission of letters: We can’t go to Jo’burg
(We cannot go to She’d’ve had the cat-o’-nine-tails, I s’pose, if we hadn’t stopped ‘im
(She would have had a right old lashing, I reckon, if we had not intervened) However, it is
generally accepted that familiar contractions such as bus (omnibus), flu
(influenza), phone (telephone), photo (photograph) and cello (violoncello)
no longer require apologetic apostrophes. In fact to write “Any of that wine
left in the ‘fridge, dear?” looks today self-conscious, not to say poncey. Other contractions have made the full leap into
new words, anyway. There is simply nowhere to hang an apostrophe on “nuke”
(explode a nuclear device), “telly” (television) or
“pram” (perambulator) — although,
believe me, people have tried. Most famously
of all, the apostrophe of omission creates the word “it’s”: It’s your turn
(it is your turn) It’s got very
cold (it has got very cold) It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the nicht (no idea) To those who
care about punctuation, a sentence such as “Thank God its
Friday” (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of
violence. The confusion of the possessive “its” (no apostrophe) with the
contractive “it’s” (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy
and sets off a simple Pavlovian “kill” response in
the average stickler. The rule is: the word “it’s” (with apostrophe) stands
for “it is” or “it has”. If the word does not stand for “it is” or “it has”
then what you require is “its”. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your
itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the
world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of
Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, “Good food at it’s best”, you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked
up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave. 5 It
indicates strange, non-standard English: A forest of apostrophes in dialogue
(often accompanied by unusual capitalisation)
conventionally signals the presence in a text of a peasant, a cockney or an
earnest northerner from whom the heart-chilling word “nobbut”
may soon be heard. Here is what the manly gamekeeper Mellors
says to his employer’s wife in chapter eight of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “Appen yer’d better ‘ave this key, an’
Ah mm fend for t’ bods some other road ... ‘Appen Ah can
find anuther pleece as’ll du for rearm’ th’ pheasants. If
yer want ter be
‘ere, yo’ll non want me messin’
abaht a’ th’ time.” “Why don’t you
speak ordinary English?” Lady Chatterley inquires, saucily. 6
It features in Irish names such as
O’Neill and O’Casey: Again the theory that this is a simple
contraction — this time of “of”
(as in John o’ Gaunt) — is
pure woolly misconception. Not a lot of people know this, but the “0” in Irish
names is an anglicisation of “ua”,
meaning grandson. 7
It indicates the plurals of letters: How many f’s
are there in Fulham? (Larky answer, beloved of
football fans: there’s only one fin Fuiham) In the winter months, his R’s blew off
(old Peter Cook and Dudley Moore joke, explaining the mysterious zoo sign “T
OPICAL FISH, THIS WAY”) 8
It also indicates plurals of words: What are the do’s and don’t’s? Are there too many but’s
and and’s at the beginnings of sentences these
days? I hope that by now you are already
feeling sorry for the apostrophe. Such a list of legitimate apostrophe jobs
certainly brings home to us the imbalance of responsibility that exists in
the world of punctuation. I mean, full stops are quite important, aren’t
they? Yet by contrast to the versatile apostrophe, they are stolid little
chaps, to say the least. In fact one might dare to say that while the full
stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation world
(do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the apostrophe
is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and yon, and
succumbing to burnout from all the thankless effort. Only one significant
task has been lifted from the apostrophe’s workload in recent years: it no
longer has to appear in the plurals of abbreviations (“MPs”) or plural dates
(“198os”). Until quite recently, it was customary to write “MP’s” and
“ig8o’s” — and in fact this
convention still applies in But it is in
the nature of punctuation lovers to care about such things, and I applaud all
those who seek to protect the apostrophe from misuse. For many years Keith
Waterhouse operated an Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant
Apostrophe in the Daily Mirror and then the Daily Mail, cheered on by
literally millions of readers. He has printed hundreds of examples of apostrophe
horrors, my all-time favourite being the rather
subtle, “Prudential — were
here to help you”, which looks just a bit unsettling until you realise that what it’s supposed to say is, “Prudential — we’re here to help you”. And Keith
Waterhouse has many successors in the print. Kevin Myers, columnist of The
Irish Times, recently published a fictional story about a man who joins
the League of Signwriter’s and Grocer’s and
Butcher’s Assistant’s, only to discover that his girlfriend is a stickler for
grammatical precision. Meanwhile, William Hartston,
who writes the “Beachcomber” column in The Express, has come up with
the truly inspired story of the Apostropher Royal,
an ancient and honourable post inaugurated in the
reign of Queen Elizabeth I. His story goes that a humble greengrocer (in days
of yore) was delivering potatoes to Good Queen Bess and happened to notice a
misplaced apostrophe in a royal decree. When he pointed it out, the Queen
immediately created the office of Apostropher Royal,
to control the quality and distribution of apostrophes and deliver them in
wheelbarrows to all the greengrocers of Do people other than professional
writers care, though? Well, yes, and I have proof in heaps. As I was
preparing for this book, I wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph, hoping to elicit a few punctuation horror
stories, and it was like detonating a dam. Hundreds of emails and letters
arrived, all of them testifying to the astonishing power of recall we
sticklers have when things have annoyed us (“It was in 1987, I’ll never
forget, and it said “CREAM TEA’S”); and also to the justifiable despair of
the well educated in a dismally illiterate world. Reading the letters, I was
alternately thrilled that so many people had bothered to write and sunk low
by such overwhelming evidence of Singular possessive instead of simple plural (the “greengrocer’s
apostrophe”): Trouser’s reduced Coastguard Cottage’s Next
week: nouns and apostrophe’s! (BBC website advertising a grammar course for
children) Singular
possessive instead of plural possessive: Pupil’s
entrance (on a very selective school, presumably) Adult
Learner’s Week (lucky him) Frog’s Piss (French wine putting unfair strain on
single frog) Member’s
May Ball (but with whom will the member dance?) Nude
Reader’s Wives (intending “Readers’ Nude Wives”, of course, but conjuring up
an interesting picture of polygamous nude reader attended by middle-aged
women in housecoats and fluffy slippers) Plural
possessive instead of singular possessive: Lands’
End (mail-order company which roundly denies anything wrong with name) Bobs’
Motors No
possessive where possessive
is required: Citizens
Advice Bureau Mens Toilets Dangling
expectations caused by incorrect pluralisation: Pansy’s
ready (is she?) Cyclist’s
only (his only what?) Please
replace the trolley’s (replace the trolley’s what?) and
best of all: Nigger’s
out (a sign seen in Unintentional
sense from unmarked possessive: Dicks
in tray (try not to think about it) New
members welcome drink (doubtless true) Someone
knows an apostrophe is
required but where, oh where? It need’nt be
a pane (on a van advertising discount glass) Ladie’s hairdresser Mens
coat’s Childrens’ education (in a letter from the head
of education at the National Union of Teachers) The Peoples Princess’ (on memorial mug)
Freds’ restaurant Apostrophes
put in place names/proper names: Dear Mr
Steven’s XMA’S TREES Glady’s (badge on salesgirl) Did’sbury It’s
or Its’ instead of Its: Hundreds of examples, many from
respectable National Trust properties and big corporations, but notably: Hot Dogs a Meal in Its’ Self (sign in
Great Yarmouth) Recruitment at it’s best (slogan of
employment agency) “…to welcome you to the British
Library, it’s services and catalogues” (reader induction pamphlet at British
Library) Plain
illiteracy: “…giving
the full name and title of the person who’s details are given in Section 02” (on Make our customer’s live’s
easier (Abbey National advertisement) Gateaux’s (evidently never spelled any
other way) Your 21 today! (on birthday card) Commas
instead of apostrophes: Antique,s (on A12o near Coichester) apples,s orange,s grape,s (all thankfully on the same stall) Signs
that have given up trying: Reader offer Author
photograph Customer
toilet This
is a mere sample of the total I received. I heard from people whose work
colleagues used commas instead of apostrophes; from someone rather
thoughtfully recommending a restaurant called l’Apostrophe
in Reims (address on request); and from a Somerset
man who had cringed regularly at a sign on a market garden until he
discovered that its proprietor’s name was — you couldn’t make it up — R. Carrott.
This explained why the sign said “Carrott’s” at the
top, you see, but then listed other vegetables and fruits spelled and
punctuated perfectly correctly. Even
if you’re not a teacher or a punctuation stickler, you’ll enjoy reading Eats,
Shoots & Leaves. If you receive this book as a gift, consider it a
message that you may be puntuationally challenged. Steve
Hopkins, June 25, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the July 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Eats,
Shoots and Leaves.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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