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”.
===============================================================
Read the rest of the entry at Climate Audit here
Now you know why Australians blush when when someone asks if they would like a root…beer!
Now one gets to an age when commas are just something you fling at a sentence, like mixing currants into a bun!!
At a very young age we were given this to punctuate so it made sense.
That that is is that that is not is not is not that it
Should be easy for the punctuation police!!
“bear-like mammal”
I always thought it was a bear.
A former Premier of Queensland was a peanut farmer. A cation with his photo in a newspaper had a comma error, resulting in “Well known peanut, farmer Joh P-B”.
Then there was the politician itching for a vigorous debate, who appealed through the Chair “Mr Speaker, are you going to take all this lying down?” The Speaker replied “No, the man from Hansard does that.”
Slightly O/T here, but I can’t help but envision the warmistas reading this post, with its 75 comments, going absolutely out of their minds.
Seventy-five comments about punctuation, panda sex and hand guns, and most of the warm-monger sites would have a hard time getting five comments on even an article that once and for all determines that AGW is really athropogenic. Can’t you all just see Michael Mann’s bald little head turning bright red and spinning around like a man possessed?
This very morning, several of them are mumbling in their coffee, “Seventy-five comments? Seventy-five comments about an effing comma? What am I doing wrong? We’re going to have to fake more documents from Heartland just to get attention.”
It seems that people that get too wrapped up on the wrong side of a cause (or is it wrapped up in a wrong cause) oftentimes take themselves too seriously to even be able to have fun with something like this. It’s a shame because life’s too short not to enjoy it.
George says:
March 2, 2012 at 2:03 pm
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.
George, you are certainly correct in that the Panda eats shoots, presumably bamboo shoots. But then, in the joke, the hand gun becomes redundant so how does the panda shoot the other customers? Thus the correct phrase for the panda’s actions is “eats shoots, shoots and leaves.”
What’s more pathetic, putting an extra letter on potato, calling the wee-weee-weeee police about it or choosing presidential candidates because of it?
A comma, is a pause. It can be used to clarify or emphasize. “And” is used to denote the end of a series; with a comma before the ‘and (final item)’.
Just read back your sentence to see if it conveys what you wish it to, or if it sounds awkward.
@ur momisugly David U.K.
Congratulations on your intellectual honesty.
I too have often wanted to call back posts after I have irrevocably created them. I console myself with the thought that I’d be an even bigger fool if I tried to conceal that error.
I cannot help but contrast your attitude with that of Michael Mann. The post-modern scientist who perpetrated the ‘hockey stick’ which used inappropriate proxies and inappropriate statistical methods, exacerbated his error by adding a novel data set upside down apparently to try to prove he was ‘right all along’.
Since the topic ;has strayed from Peter Gleick’s Oxford commas to language in general, I’ll throw in a few Steven Pinker isms.
Fruit flies like a banana.
Time flies like an arrow.
Another type of sentence addressed by Steven Pinker is the “garden path” sentence.
One example is
“The horse raced past the barn fell.”
Believe it or not, that’s a grammatically correct, though poorly constructed sentence.
(The horse ridden around the house stayed on its feet, but the horse raced past the barn fell)
More garden path sentences:
The man whistling tunes pianos.
The cotton clothing is made of grows in Mississippi.
The government plans to raise taxes were defeated.
Of course we would have a big discussion about a comma. You should see what we do about a decimal point 😀
Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue prints that great Samuel Johnson quote:
“His writing is both good and original; unfortunately the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.”
A thread about grammar and I’ve misused the verb prints. The word should be “contains”, “includes”, or even “has”.
Alan D McIntire says:
March 3, 2012 at 7:02 am
Ok, how about: The number of your fingers are more prone to frostbite.
The brain commits to one pronunciation, then realizing that doesn’t work, it is necessary to go back to resolve the ambiguity. The problem is avoided with context: “Be careful in winter. Cold conditions can reduce feeling in extremities. The number of your fingers are more prone to frostbite.”
But of course, you would probably never want to write that last sentence.
aharris says:
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.”
Is it possible to have a grammatically correct sentence with the word ‘and’ written five times in succession? Apparently it is. A sign writer writes out a new sign for a pub thus: The King, and, Queen. When the publican views the work he comments “there is no comma between the King and and and and and Queen”.
The million dollar coma
http://pilr.blogs.law.pace.edu/2011/10/13/drafting-errors-the-case-of-the-million-dollar-comma/
I never knew that this was called the Oxford comma, but it is how I was taught in school in the mid-sixties, in the US, I use it most of the time, but I notice that on the internet commas are almost never used, so sometimes I don’t use any.
When I was a kid, I was alwasy tremendously bored out of my mind, sitting in a class room, listening to some drone mowing on like there was no tomorrow or next period even.
So sitting kindly, nicely, at the back row, so as not to be a distraction (it was thought) to everyone else in back looking front, without clawing my own eye balls out out of utter abysmall boredom, I stood up, raised my hands as far as they could strecth, to each side, and said upon them, in a booming, deathly, hollow voice, from the other side:
I A M G O D
Everyone was dumbstruck, trying not too laugh out loud, but snickering none the less. The teacher, in linguistics, teaching english to this here simpleton, walk up, looked ever as stern, and gave me a good smacking.
I was gobsmacked. WTF was that all ’bout, I shouted, in disbelief!
Son, the evil operating oxford deamon of the english system said, that was the point to your exclamation!
That that is is that that is not is not is not that it –
Gee, I thought the punctuation pro’s would easily provide the correct punctuation. Is it too easy?
I am saddened to reach the end of these comments. Much fun today.
IanM
Butt your comment was not the end ….. (And what is the point of calling a row of periods ellipses? Do I call a triangle a trypaziod that failed to do it?)
MarkW says:
March 2, 2012 at 2:15 pm
The teams will be made up of James and John, Jack and Jill, and Rowan and Martin.
A better way of punctuating this would be “The teams will be made up of: James and John; Jack and Jill; and Rowan and Martin”.
Do you want to express an array of three dimensions? You’re on your own.
Regarding capitalization, try reading the Constitution of the United States and (for once) paying attention to which words have capital first letters.
commas unfairly, are being mocked.
(Sigh)
A whole thread of Engineers gone wild!
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
I will use commas to illustrate.
That that is, is, that that is not, is not, is not that it?
There are other ways to punctuate to make sense, I’ll leave that to the experts. (smile)