I do. Aside from being a cracking tune from a band I’m listening to right now (Vampire Weekend), I have noticed that my punctuation has gone to pot. Actually, my grammar in general. I have a tendency to use commas left, right and centre. Listening to the below tune earlier, and cringing while reading over some earlier blog posts, I was reminded of book I purchased about 5/6 years ago titled ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ by Lynn Truss.
The author, annoyed with the state of punctuation in general, decided to write a book to show the importance of the correct usage.
The title of the book is an amphibology – a verbal fallacy arising from an ambiguous grammatical construction—and derived from a joke on bad punctuation:
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. ‘Look it up.’
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.’
I enjoyed the book but it obviously didn’t pay off. I’ll make it my business to find it and read again and hopefully improve my punctuation! We’ll see. In the meantime enjoy some Vampire Weekend.
