Not a book about a gun toting, gluttonous panda after all!

Eats Shoots and Leaves
I know I am well behind the times by only managing to read this book now. I have been picking it up, almost buying it, and then putting it down again for the past four years.

To make matters worse, I come from the generation that causes Lynne Truss so much anguish. The generation that was not formally taught grammar and punctuation. We were expected to inherently adopt it, perhaps through osmosis. The only lesson in grammar I remember at all was learning that "a verb is a doing word".

Like many people in my position, anything that I know about grammar came from learning other languages. I still remember the baffled silence that followed Madame Bilstra announcing "Today we will learn how to conjugate the French subjunctive". Subjunctive? None of us had ever heard of a subjunctive, let alone how to identify or use it in any language. To this day I only really know how to identify and correctly conjugate a subjunctive in French.

Ironically, although my French is utterly mediocre, my knowledge of the workings of French sentence structure is far superior to my knowledge of English sentence structure. So much for English being my first language.

Back to the book.

Lynn Truss is passionate about punctuation, which is obvious otherwise why would she write a book about it. Some would suggest that she is a little obsessed and crazed about it.

I will concur that some of her passionate remarks verge a little on the side of mania. However, I work for writers and can verify that emphatically emotional reactions to misdemeanors in grammar and punctuation, that most of us would consider to be inconsequential, are completely normal.

I suspect that some of my writers took the author's "call to arms to protect punctuation" quite seriously. I often get nasty little notes pointing out even the most minor of errors. Unfortunately, I am not in a position where I can retaliate by pointing out equally rudely just how acutely numerically challenged they are.

All that aside, the book has help my untrained mind in trying to comprehend the correct use of punctuation. I still have a long way to go. I will admit that I do get nervous about my comma, semi-colon, and colon usage.

If nothing else my hat tips in respect to Ms. Truss for successfully managing to make, what in reality is very dry subject matter, entertaining.

Who would have thought that a book on punctuation could be #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list!