Peter Rhodes on commas, Kylie and devoting your life to punctuation
As promised, a column about commas. At a second-hand stall here in Beer, I bought a copy of Lynne Truss’s 2003 best-seller Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a guide to punctuation ancient and modern. Until picking it up this week I had no idea there were 17 rules for the comma.
I met Truss at an awards ceremony in the 1990s where we turned out, in a room full of air-kissing celebrities and luvvies, to be the only people who didn’t know everybody else. We sat together, united in obscurity: Unknown Provincial Hack and That Apostrophe Woman. You would not imagine that someone devoting her life with monastic single-mindedness to the difference between it’s and its would be such great company.
Anyway, all these years later, I’m glad to have read her book, even if it does make you hyper-sensitive (or should that be hypersensitive?) to your own use of dots, dashes, commas, colons, and all the rest. Did I really need that last comma?
I was impressed by Truss spotting the casual abandonment of full stops so long ago. Today, kids tend to end texts which are meant to be a statement of fact not with a full stop but with a question mark (“London’s a great place?”) which may explain why so many young people end their sentences on a higher note. Just like Kylie?
Twenty years after publication, I’m not sure Eats, Roots & Leaves has had much impact on how we express ourselves. While some great writers are prepared to come to blows over a misplaced hyphen, Joe Public still scatters commas like tadpoles and it’s a rare greengrocer whose stock doesn’t include carrot’s, apple’s or onion’s.
Meanwhile, busy saving Creation, how virtuous I feel. I bought a new T-shirt which comes with three tags of recycled paper. The first tag tells me the garment is “helping improve and preserve the environment by using recycled and organic material wherever possible. The second tag says they strive to make the planet a better place to be by using recycled plastics. The third tag says they use organic cotton. Why not put it all on one tag? The campaign to save tags starts here.
