| By
Neil Dyson
Consider
the two sentences:
"A
woman, without her man, is nothing"
and
"A
woman: without her, man is nothing"
By
simply replacing a comma with a colon we end up with two completely
different statements, and this is the essence of Lynn Truss's bestselling
book Eats, Shoots and Leaves.
Seeing
Lynn Truss talk made for an entertaining hour. Her book is full
of analogies similar to the one above; from the use of commas to
apostrophise to semi-colons, and she highlighted numerous examples
of them to the packed Oxford debating chamber.
Her
book wasn't supposed to be such a success, and she readily admitted
that it had caught her out by surprise. I'm sure it found itself
in many Christmas stockings this year, and it's being translated
and adapted for countries around the world.
On
the face of it a book about punctuation doesn't sound too exciting,
but it is well worth a read. Consider now the recent London Underground
campaign to encourage people to report suspicious packages. The
(current) posters read:
"Don't
touch, check with other passengers, inform station staff, or call
999"
On
the first glance this seems like a perfectly logical request; if
you see a suspicious package you need to do one of the above. But
if you read it again, what it actually asks you to do is NONE of
the things it lists! The misuse of the comma has completely turned
such a serious request on its head.
What
Lynn Truss tried to emphasise was that on the whole, people will
get things wrong every so often. No one is perfect, and people make
mistakes. But when it's establishments like our government making
such elementary mistakes then you really do need to ask yourself
if enough people have a good enough grip of punctuation, or if we
all need to be forced to read her eye-opening book?
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