Truss Lynne. Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Книга о грамматике - точнее, о синтаксисе (части грамматики - но ведь в английском и притяжательный падеж обозначается апострофом - многострадальным, как показано в этой книге, апострофом) стала бестселлером! Правила пунктуации иллюстрируются анекдотами, рассказами об историческом развитии пунктуации, цитатами из Шекспира, Бернарда Шоу, Антона Чехова и многих других."Punctuation has been defined many ways. Some grammarians use the analogy of stitching: punctuation as the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape. Another writer tells us that punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop."Non-fiction book written by Lynne Truss, the former host of the BBC Radio 4's Cutting a Dash programme. In the book, published in 2003, Truss bemoans the state of punctuation in the United Kingdom and the United States and describes how rules are being relaxed in today's society. Her goal is to remind readers of the importance of punctuation in the English language by mixing humour and instruction.- Introduction -The Seventh Sense
- The Tractable Apostrophe
- That'll Do, Comma
- Airs and Graces
- Cutting a Dash
- A Little Used Punctuation Mark
- Merely Conventional Signs
- BibliographyTruss dedicates the book "to the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution."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.'There is one chapter each on apostrophes and on commas, one on semicolons and colons, one on exclamation marks, question marks, and quotation marks, italic type, dashes, brackets, ellipses, and emoticons, and one on hyphens. Truss touches on varied aspects of the history of punctuation and includes many anecdotes, which add another dimension to her explanations of grammatical rules. In the book's final chapter, she opines on the importance of maintaining punctuation rules and addresses the damaging effects of e-mail and the Internet on punctuation.