Steve McIntyre writes: Lynn Truss‘ book on punctuation “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” received astonishing coverage.
The title of the book is based on the following joke:
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons. ‘Why?’ asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. ‘Well, I’m a panda,’ he says, at the door. ‘Read the manual.’ The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
‘Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.’
Had the manual been written by Peter Gleick, the manual would have read “eats, shoots, and leaves”.
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Read the rest of the entry at Climate Audit here
Ho ho. Read this earlier at the other place. It’s a joke I remember from my childhood but in the UK in the 70’s it did not involve any firearms but was a tale of impromptu masturbation.
put the commas where you will.
Hey, wait a minute! I also use a comma before the last item of a series, before a conjunction, as do many publishing houses that follow The Chicago Manual of Style (in my 13th Edition, it’s item 5.50). But I don’t put commas between verbs and objects—did Gleick?
/Mr Lynn
The joy of the Oxford comma!
I believe it’s called the ‘Oxford comma’ – I was taught (in UK) that in a list you did not have a comma before the ‘and’ at the end because the ‘and’ was itself the final comma. However some at Oxford University disagree with this.
Ugh, the Oxford Comma debate rears its ugly head.
I would like to thank my parents, Peter Gleick and Madonna.☺
My wife picked up Lynn Trus’ Eats, Shoots and Leaves last year and after reading it, handed it to me one evening. I didn’t put it down until I read it cover to cover. It takes a genius to write a gripping book on grammar and punctuation.
I don’t know why everyone’s going on about Peter Gleick’s punctuation. but then, I tend to over-punctuate, I’ve been told. It’s an older style and if I recall correctly, Lynn’s advice on when to punctuate is that there is no hard and fast rule and that the best way is to use punctuation to break-up and make sense of the sentence in a way it would be most easily understood.
Yes, my job is to proof-read, and our in-house style is to take out all commas before the conjunctions in a series. So we would punctuate it “eats, shoots and leaves.”
The Australian version of this typically involves a wombat rather than a panda. The word, “roots”, is inserted after the word, “eats” – properly commatised (?) each side! “Roots” is a standard Aussie euphemism for “doing the deed”, thus making is a slightly naughty line!
I will note that Microsoft Word has a setting that requires the comma before the last item in a list. Does that mean Gleick and Microsoft are working together?
Mr Lynn says:
March 2, 2012 at 1:18 pm
Good point, although I would normally refer to The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. Gleick may be correct in his usage of the comma but his ethics leave much to be desired.
Modern usage of the comma is more laid back and forgiving. For example, proper usage would be:
but modern usage allows for a more forgiving style:
It’s a pity that Gleick’s ethics aren’t as correct as is his punctuation.
wrt the panda joke, I don’t really find it funny, because I cannot believe anyone would write a phrase like that – clearly there should be no comma in those words at all – or am I just being too simplistic?
Compare this to the Australian Wombat : ‘Wombat,. a large short-legged, short-tailed, muscular burrowing marsupial approximately 1-metre long, native to south-eastern Australia.
Eats, roots, shoots and leaves.’
Oh. Lettuce assume then that you have no punny bone, and thus, must have each phrase explanated to ewe more clearly.
True, true. Your phrase is exactly write: “Eats shoots and leaves” IS what your average run-of-the-mill panda-wombat does.
The yolk is in the clever parsing of the phrase by adding an unneeded, and incorrect-in-the-context of a panda-wombat not entering a bar with a handgun and shooting the patrons, comma.
What is most indignant, to the eye of the much-suffering waiter as the protagonist in this telling of the story, is that the panda-wombat does all the above … Without paying for his meal!
Kev-in-UK says:
Or perhaps you are simply commatose.
Wow… no one puts a comma after the verb. It should be “Eats shoots, and leaves” although Oxford is falling out here. Still use it and it annoys and the 20 somethings.
And I had heard it was Eats, Roots, and Leaves the first time I heard it 🙂
Also look for the WWF panda with logo and another panda standing behind it about to hit it with a chair (a la World Wrestling Federation)
Oh… missing sarc on the first for the grammar police sigh.
Very much like Math (and by extension, Science), English is hard.
My 8th grader is struggling through Romeo and Juliet. My older daughter was trying to get him to pay close attention to the commas in the text since if he knew how to recognize the use she thought he would have an easier time with the text. He was confused so she wrote two sentences for him:
Let’s eat Grandma!
Let’s eat, Grandma!
My son understood it perfectly then!
The problem with leaving the comma off before the and, is that occasionally the and works to join elements within the list.
For example,
The teams will be made up of James and John, Jack and Jill, and Rowan and Martin.
For me, the lack of a comma before the and means that the final two words are supposed to be a single element within the list.
Your mileage may vary
Sorry to say, but perhaps substituting ‘to fire it at the other …….’ with ‘to fire it at the establishment’s light fittings’ might be more appropriate for some (tragically) impressionable American school kids who may read the blog.
If I should ever migrate to the US, I am going to settle in a right-to-carry state.
I bet that bloody panda would never risk return fire…
I saw cars that were red, green and blue.
How may cars did I see?
Commas are important, when used properly.
Australians have a different spin on that joke – Eats roots shoots and leaves.
Roots has a sexual meaning as does shoots – I’ll say no more.
In Australia the joke is “why is the aussie male like a wombat?” – A. because he eats roots and leaves. ( explanation, “root” is an australian colloquial metaphor for copulate)