Eat's, Shoot's and Leave's

I went to see a talk by Lynne Truss the other week. She wrote “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”, a best-seller about punctuation. She argues that punctuation standards in English are slipping. I don’t agree, which you might think is surprising considering that I teach English. People have always had difficulty with punctuation. And standards are changing rather than slipping.

Calling herself a "stickler", it makes her angry to see errors in punctuation. She writes about her desire to wander around with a paintbrush painting in apostrophes on incorrectly punctuated shop signs. I’ve read most of her book, and found its tone hectoring and disagreeable. Her talk was also hectoring and disagreeable. She created an environment in which those who attended her talk were the educated and enlightened minority, and we could all have a good laugh at those silly people who get it wrong. She offered no solutions for the “problem”.

She admitted that part of the “problem” of incorrect usage is that the rules have changed recently. Recently? The rules are ever-changing. You only have to read a 19th century novel to see that. Anyway, she gave this example: where it was once correct to apostrophise “MP’s”, it is now correct not to: “MPs”. Where it was once “1980’s”, it is now “1980s”. As an aside, she added that they still apostrophise in America.

Cue patronising laughter at all Americans.

Her closing gag was about a taxi driver in London. He’d asked her where she was going. She replied that she was on her way to give a talk about punctuation. He replied:

“I’d better make sure you’re not late, then.”

Cue patronising laughter at taxi drivers.

In her book she asserts:

“If I did not believe that everyone is capable of understanding where an apostrophe goes, I would not be writing this book.”

Later on, she cites the Oxford Companion to English Literature:

“There never was a golden age in which the rules for the possessive apostrophe were clear cut and known, understood and followed by most educated people.”

So, if not even “educated” people get it, what hope do Americans and taxi drivers have?

She asserts that incorrect punctuation renders some texts difficult to understand:

“The reason it’s worth standing up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning.”

Utter nonsense. She cites an example of a florist’s sign which reads:

“Pansy’s ready”.

She follows this with the comment:

“Pansy’s ready for what?”

She’s ignoring the context from which the example came. Surely, as readers standing outside a florist, we’re intelligent enough to work out that “pansy” denotes flower rather than person? Her argument implies that readers are unable to work out the most obvious meanings for themselves. We are not thick. We do it in conversation all the time. Homonyms, for instance, are words which have the same spelling but more than one meaning. Take the word “bank”. We don’t need a punctuation mark to show us the meaning of: “Let’s go to the bank” because we use the context of the utterance to interpret it. If we’re on the high street, we assume “bank” means place that dispenses money. If we’re by a river, we assume “bank” means edge of the river.

But to expect a florist to spend their time carefully considering their use of the possessive apostrophe when making a sign for their pansies is ludicrous. As if they don’t have more important things to think about. Truss is a writer and a broadcaster, so she should get punctuation right. But I’d much rather have a florist who was an expert in flowers than a florist who was an expert in punctuation. Of course, I’m sure that many are both.

The thing that annoys me most is that for all the bluster and “wit” of her book, it offers no solution to the “problem”. It doesn’t tell anyone how to understand where they’re going wrong. Sure, it gives examples of correct and incorrect usage, but, believe me, just giving examples of how “stupid” some people are isn’t going to solve the “problem”. I’d like Truss to go into a school and see how hard it is for some children to understand the “rules”. It’s complicated, and many of the “rules” are flexible. Even writers of grammar books can’t agree on the rule of the pluralisation of possessives (is it Truss’ book or Truss’s book?). She admits herself that she needed a “host of proof readers” to save her any embarrassment. So it can’t be that easy, can it?

Truss also argues against emoticons. I don’t like them either. But for someone in their fifties to say that emoticons are "desperate" is like the argument against Elvis’ swivelling hips in the 50s. That argument just looks stupid now. Elvis isn’t daring anymore. He’s establishment. How can anyone have ever found that vulgar? So, language changes, and traditionalists are scared of change, maybe because it is in the hands of the people who use language in new ways and in new media. In the case of emoticons, young people have invented a new way of communicating their feelings. I prefer not to use emoticons because I think they’re daft and childish. But I can see that they’re also a useful addition to the language of the text message, the email or the instant message. They’re quick and to the point. Words on a screen don’t convey sarcasm or irony particularly well. I’ve sent many joking messages to people, only for them to think I’ve been serious. If only I didn’t find emoticons daft and childish, I might not get into so much trouble – I could have sent a (-; - or whatever it is.

Emoticons, which started as keyboard strokes, are now automatically created on my mobile phone. When I want to include an ellipsis (…) my phone automatically turns it into a (-:. You can download emoticons. She says they’re “desperate”. They’re not. They’re established.

She’s too late. So much so that, in a few generations time, it wouldn’t surprise me if some 50-something traditionalist writes a piece about the sad demise of the emoticon and how standards have slipped…

It doesn’t matter what Truss says, or what she thinks. Language will continue to change. She’s like King Canute trying to stop the tide coming in. Embrace it or choose not to use it, but, if you try to stop it, you’ll end up drowning.

I’m not saying that punctuation isn’t important, or shouldn’t be taught. As an English teacher, I find it extremely difficult to read a student’s work which has no full stops (periods). What Truss fails to understand is that it’s easy to show people’s mistakes, but it’s far harder to make someone understand why they’re making them. Try now to put into words where a full stop goes in a sentence.

You probably found yourself saying something like: “It’s where you take a breath.” So how do you explain where to put a comma, then? Maybe you found yourself saying something like: “It’s where you move on to a new topic”. Surely that’s the start of a new paragraph?

In order to really teach where full stops go, you need to go into clauses and subject-verb relationships – you know, get technical. As you can imagine, some students get it. Some of them say they get it when they don’t. Some of them don’t get it at all and make no effort to. Most of them aren’t interested. And a full stop is probably the easiest punctuation mark of all. And English is also about being creative.

And if you think that everyone in a class of 30 or more is capable of understanding the possessive apostrophe, when there’s only one teacher, and you only have an hour, and you have other things to study, and a lot of them already know that they won’t need this knowledge later on in life, you need trussing up.

Surely no one's interested in punctuation anyway. It's a very dull subject. I bet no one bothers to read this far.