Eats, Shoots and Leaves

That is the name of a moderately hilarious book about punctuation. Yes, punctuation. I bet you didn’t think punctuation could be funny. But consider this example of the power of the humble hyphen: Extra-marital sex breaks one of the Ten Commandments, but extra marital sex ”tis a consummation devoutly to be wish’d’.

In the book title above, observe the power of the comma. The Koala Bear Eats Shoots and Leaves. This refers to the animal’s diet. Add the comma and the critter turns into a disgruntled diner who pulls out a weapon and starts firing before making its get away Note: no apostrophe makes ‘its’ possessive: add the apostrophe and you have a contraction of ‘it is’. There is a quiz later.

Now I’m not a grammar fanatic, although if you misuse ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ I’m going to quietly giggle. Likewise for ‘there’ and ‘their and ‘they’re’. On the other hand, if you misuse ‘capital’ and ‘capitol’ or fail to realize that ‘historic’ and ‘historical’ are not interchangeable, you won’t hear anything from me. I’m likely to make those errors myself.

After all, I’m not a professional writer. But people who work for newspapers presumably are. Which makes any errors or ambiguities on their part very entertaining. After all, what duffer golfer doesn’t get a little pleasure out of seeing a pro hit one into the lake occasionally?

A while back a local winery won a prestigious national award. The headline read “Local Winery Named Best in the County”. Which is true, since the county is a part of the country, but it kind of deflates the impact of the story.

Or consider this one “Attorney praises police officers being fired”. When I saw that I thought this was one brave and perhaps foolhardy attorney. Then I read the story and found out that the headline might have been clearer if it had read “Attorney praises firing of police officers.” Good writing puts the object of the verb as close to it as possible. The original headline is ambiguous at best, and I think most people reading it would conclude that the attorney was offering plaudits to the police, which the subsequent story made clear was not the case.

I know I’m behind the times. When I text I use complete sentences, capital (not capitol) letters, and punctuation. Voice texting doesn’t work especially well for me since I have to make a lot of changes before hitting ‘send’. And don’t get me started on ‘auto correct’. Their it is…