Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Lynne Truss

      A couple of weeks after Eats, Shoots & Leaves was first published in November 2003, I met an old subeditor friend at a party who said: “You’ve written a whole book on punctuation? How fascinating!” and then went on to explain that, funnily enough, he had once devised a rather good comic routine around a martial art called Pung Shway Shon, in which the karate-style moves were derived from well-known punctuation marks. I tried to be brave about this, but it was hard not to take it badly. “Well,” I said; “Pung Shway Shon! Ha ha. Would you describe this as the sort of hilarious thing, ha ha, that a person who’d just written a whole book on punctuation might have wanted to include, possibly giving it a chapter to itself, but now it would be too late so she might have to go off quietly now and kill herself ?” “Well, yes, I suppose I would,” he said, and went on to demonstrate Pung Shway Shon in a highly amusing manner, as I felt my life-blood ebb away in misery.

      This is the sort of thing that happens to all authors, of course. The other day someone told me she had just finished her book on a period of British social history, and had just delivered it by hand to her publisher, and I immediately started saying, “Ooh, did you read X? Did you read Y?”, unable to stop myself as her eyes swivelled in obvious panic as she tried to remember the number of the London Library. But Pung Shway Shon! Why hadn’t my researches thrown this up? A jabbing punch forward is a full stop. A quick one-two of jabbing punches, one above the other: the colon! A punch followed, beneath, by a twisty karate skewering motion is the semicolon. And if you take a big breath, and put your glass of water down for a minute, you can use both arms to do a quite aerobic pair of brackets – round, square, angled or curly, depending entirely on preference.

      Sadly, the existence of Pung Shway Shon wasn’t the only thing that came to light far too late for inclusion in Eats, Shoots & Leaves. People phoned radio programmes with apostrophe-disaster examples such as “Residents refuse to go in the bins”; chaps pointed out that the first line of Moby-Dick (“Call me Ishmael”) became quite different with a comma in it (“Call me, Ishmael”). Of course, I laughed, made a note, and then just banged my head on any available surface. But the worst of all was the case of Timothy Dexter. “I’m sure there’s a book that has all the punctuation together at the end,” a friend had said, quite early on in my researches. “An eighteenth-century book, I think. Possibly by a mad person. All I know is: there’s no punctuation in the text, and then the author prints a whole page of commas and full stops at the back and says, ‘Put it in yourself if you want’. But, do you know, I just can’t remember his name, or the name of the book, or where he came from, or whether I dreamed it.”

      Naturally, I searched for this fabulous case of punctuation iconoclasm, using these meagre clues, but got nowhere. Sometimes, I admit, I thought my friend had been making it up. And then, the moment the book was in print, I was chatting on the phone to a bookseller friend in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and he said: “Tell you what, I’ll get you a nice copy of A Pickle for the Knowing Ones.” And I said, cheerfully, “What’s that, then?” And he said, “The Timothy Dexter.” And I said, “Sorry, what are you talking about?” And he said, “Timothy Dexter, 1748-1806, lived in Newburyport, famous eccentric; we drove past his house when you came to visit; I told you all about him. He wrote this world-famous pamphlet called A Pickle for the Knowing Ones which was so difficult to read – because he didn’t use punctuation – that he had the printer put a page of marks at the back of the second edition, with the instruction that readers should ‘peper and solt it as they plese’.” (His spelling wasn’t up to much, either.)

      So these are some of the things that would have made it into the book if I had only waited. On a more positive note, however, not many people know that this book’s dedication to the Bolshevik printers of St Petersburg was actually a very late addition to the text. After the book had been typeset and was almost ready for the printer, I was just perusing an old radio play of mine called Summoned By Shelves, set in a library in 1973, when I came across the following speech from a librarian, who happened to be an ardent Marxist-Leninist:

      ADRIAN: Do you know how the 1905 October revolution started? It began when Bolshevik printers demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters! Imagine that. World events turning on the market rate of a semicolon. Information is power, Mrs Esslin. We are the keepers of information; ergo, we hold the key to history.

      I immediately checked my facts (only in Lenin for Beginners; I was in a hurry) and whacked this story in as the last-minute dedication. Fans of irony will enjoy the incidental fact that I added the encouraging words, “Isn’t that interesting?” intending them to appear. The printer, however, left them out, presumably because I had carefully placed them inside a pair of brackets. (Obviously a Bolshevik.)

      Lynne Truss

       May 2007

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Dedication