For my birthday my dad gave me a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynn Truss. Some of you might never understand how great a book about punctuation can be. Here are a few excerpts for the rest of you:
A panda walks into a café. 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.”
Here’s a great example of a punctuation mishap from history:
[Witness the] example of the fateful mispunctuated telegram that previpitated the Jameson Raid on the Transvaal in 1896 […] The Transvaal was a Boer republic at the time, and it was believed that the British and other settlers around Johannesburg (who were denied civil rights) would rise up if Jameson invaded. But unfortunately, when the settlers sent their telegraphic invitation to Jameson, it included a tragic ambiguity:
It is under these circumstances that we feel constrained to call upon you to come to our aid should a disturbance arise here the circumstances are so extreme that we cannot but believe that you and the men under you will not fail to come to the rescue of people who are so situtated.
As Eric Partridge points out in his Usage and Abusage, if you place a full stop after the word “aid” in this passaged, the message is unequivocal. It says, “Come at once!” If you put it after “here,” however, it says something more like, “We might need you at some later date depending on what happens here, but in the meantime — don’t calls us, Jameson, old boy; we’ll call you.” Of course, the message turned up at The Times with a full stop after “aid” no one knows who put it there) and poor old Jameson just sprang to the saddle, without anybody wanting or expecting him to.
Anecdotes and excerpts aside, this is a book you can judge by its cover. It features two panda bears. One is on a ladder erasing the errant comma. The other is off to speak to the author of said comma, revolver in hand.
Dorky Sidebar
Here is (I think) how one would tell that titular joke in HTML:
<p>Panda:</p> <ol> <li>Eats</li> <li>Shoots</li> <li>Leaves</li> </ol>
Which should instead be written in semantic code:
<dl> <dt>Panda</dt> <dd> <dl> <dt>Eats</dt> <dd>Shoots</dd> <dd>Leaves</dd> </dl> </dd> </dl>
Rendered in a web browser you would see:
Panda:
- Eats
- Shoots
- Leaves
And:
- Panda
- Eats
- Shoots
- Leaves