Judith
Visitor
|
Brainteaser for punctuation pedant - 2003/12/29 17:39
I received a delightful book for Christmas called: Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.* I expect others of you will have come across it too, but for those who haven’t, the story which explains the title is this:
A panda walks into a caf?©. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
“Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
“I’m a panda,” he says, at the door. “Look it up.”
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an
explanation.
“Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”
The book is a quick and easy read, both fun and informative, and should appeal to the ‘phobes’ and the ‘philes’ of modern communications technology. The writer is serious about her thesis, but writes in a lighthearted vein; if you think punctuation is not a laughing matter, how about this:
“…..semicolons are dangerously habit-forming. Many writers
hooked on semicolons become an embarrassment to their families
and friends. ……. I hear there are now Knightsbridge clinics offering semicolonic irrigation - but for many it may be too late.”
One illustration given of how meaning depends on correct punctuation is this:
A woman, without her man, is nothing.
A woman: without her, man is nothing.
So here is a brain-teaser for those who find the making of New Year resolutions boring:
Create your own (be honest, please) phrase or sentence, which can be interpreted in two very different ways according to how it is punctuated.
I haven’t managed to do one myself yet. The first one to post is on a promise of FUNdamental liberties being taken, in one form or another, at the next Jakefest!
Judith
* by Lynne Truss, published in 2003 by Profile Books at £9.99.
|
