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July 20, 2005
A panda walks into a cafe
For the pedant in us all, I cannot more highly recommend last summer's surprise bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Killjoy old Brit Lynne Truss delights the world's sticklers when she lets loose on the "appaling ignorance" of people who never learned how to make a plural (it's CDs, not CD's) or use a comma. She reserves her harshest criticism for those who should know better, including retailer Lands' End. (She doesn't acknowledge that Lands' End admits the name is wrong, which was discovered after the first catalogue went to the printer.) To demonstrate the life-or-death implications of poor grammar, Truss writes:
A panda walked into a cafe. He ordered a sandwich, ate it, then pulled out a gun and shot the waiter."Why?" groaned the injured man.
The panda shrugged, tossed him a badly punctuated wildlife manual and walked out.
And sure enough, when the waiter consulted the book, he found an explanation.
Panda: large black and white mammal native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.
Woe be the stickler nowadays:
It’s tough being a stickler for punctuation these days. One almost dare not get up in the mornings. True, one occasionally hears a marvellous punctuation-fan joke about a panda who “eats, shoots and leaves”, but in general the stickler’s exquisite sensibilities are assaulted from all sides, causing feelings of panic and isolation. A sign at a health club will announce, “I’ts party time, on Saturday 24th May we are have a disco/party night for free, it will be a ticket only evening.” Advertisements offer decorative services to “wall’s – ceiling’s – door’s ect”. Meanwhile a newspaper placard announces “FAN’S FURY AT STADIUM INQUIRY”, which sounds quite interesting until you look inside the paper and discover that the story concerns a quite large mob of fans, actually – not just the lone hopping-mad fan so promisingly indicated by the punctuation.
All of which is why I was happy to find this website today. I'm procrastinating far too much on the "list of errors" page.
Posted by adrianjo at July 20, 2005 10:18 PM
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