Eats, Shoot and Leaves
Fri, 2004-01-23 13:55
#1
Eats, Shoot and Leaves
Eats, Shoots and Leaves: the Zero Tolerance Approach To Punctuation by Lynne Truss
Apparently this hit the No1 spot at Xmas though I’d never heard of it before I saw it in Books ETC @ lunch time (I really must get out more). The author describes herself as ‘the kind of pedant who becomes incandescent at a misplaced apostrophe’ but, by the look of the reviews on Amazon, the book is riddled with the ‘apostrographical’ errors she purports to detest.
Oh bitter-sweet irony….. sounds like she might have ‘shooted’ herself in the foot.
[%sig%]
chooselife
I have to change my opinion:
Punctuation bible revives firm's fortunes By Paul Sims, Evening Standard
17 February 2004
Eats, Shoots And Leaves, the surprise best-seller about punctuation, will double the turnover of its small London publishing house to more than £5.5million this year.
The book has now sold more than 480,000 copies worldwide and is still selling so strongly in hardback that it may be another year before it goes into paperback.
Andrew Franklin, who co-founded Profile Books in 1996, said that before Eats, Shoots And Leaves became a hit he had considered giving up life as a publisher. "But now I don't feel like giving up at all.
"Every week we decide to do a further re-print, I continue to be amazed. I remain completely mystified why the country should have become obsessed with punctuation."
Mark Brown
Has anyone read this? Do they fancy writing a review of it for the site?
Drop me a line at markbrown@abctales.com if you fancy it.
Emma Bryant
Was it this writer who had a radio play broadcast a while ago in which a woman becomes obsessed by the puctuation errors on her local greengrocer's stall? I guess this question is a bit of a shot in the dark.
sheepshank
I got it for Christmas! And I didn't notice any mistakes, but that's no surprise.
I found it quite funny at times, in an over-the-top way, and tiresome at other times. She's entertaining when she gets away from apostrophes and on to semicolons etc.
God that makes me sound boring. Perhaps I am.
[%sig%]
Hen
Have to admit the mere impression of it riles me. From the comments on Amazon, she sounds like exactly the kind of pedant I've encountered in the past - OTT jolliness and japery hiding a smug contempt, and a complete disregard for the polymorphic nature of language. What makes it worse, as one of the reviewers points out, is that she probably can't speak a word of any foreign tongue herself. I like to think I'm pretty ****-hot at grammar, when I can be arsed, and I still feel terribly inadequate among multi-lingual friends. After all, that's a real achievement.
chooselife
Mais oui, Monsieur Le Hen!