Watch that comma!The surprise No. 1 best seller in Britain this year is not a suspense thriller, political memoir, or even a tell-all about the Queen It's Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a grammar treatise that leads the reader through the pitfalls of comma splicing splicing /splic·ing/ (spli´sing) 1. the attachment of individual DNA molecules to each other, as in the production of chimeric genes. 2. RNA s. ; calls the apostrophe apostrophe, figure of speech apostrophe, figure of speech in which an absent person, a personified inanimate being, or an abstraction is addressed as though present. "our long-suffering little friend"; makes a rousing case for using semicolons; and describes President Woodrow Wilson's hatred of the hyphen hyphen: see punctuation. , which he called "the most un-American thing in the world" (spectacularly undermining his own argument). Even the book's author, Lynne Truss Lynne Truss (born 1955) is an English writer and journalist who was born in Kingston upon Thames. She was educated at Tiffin Girls' School (1966-73)[1] and is a graduate of University College London, where she read English (taking the best first in her year). , a 48-year-otd writer, is surprised by its success. The book debuts in the U.S. in April. "When I was writing it everybody thought ... obviously it wouldn't sell," she says. Maybe it's the catchy title: It comes from a joke that begins, "A panda panda, name for two nocturnal Asian mammals of the order Carnivora: the red panda, Ailurus fulgens, and the giant panda, Ailuropoda melanoleuca. walks into a cafe" The panda orders a sandwich, eats it, and then fires a gun into the air. On his way out, he tosses a badly punctuated wildlife manual the confused bartender and directs him to the entry marked "Panda." Whereupon the bartender reads: "Panda. Large black- and-white bearlike mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves." |
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