Lynne Truss: Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Reviewed by PHILIP HENSHER

LONDON - The surprise best-seller of the year is Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves, billed as "The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation".

Nobody involved, it's fair to say, could have predicted even so funny and good-humoured a book on this subject taking off to this extent; the initial printing sold out so rapidly that the publisher was taken by surprise, and by now there are in excess of 100,000 copies in print, within a couple of weeks of publication.

It is a real phenomenon.

Miss Truss notes Kingsley Amis's opinion that anyone writing about linguistic usage tends to strike one as either a "berk" or a "wanker": either someone who hasn't a clue that the so-called "greengrocer's apostrophe", as in "Tomato's, £1.50" is wrong, or someone obsessive about arid points of etymology and firing off letters whenever a journalist uses "decimate" incorrectly.

I am a bit tougher than Miss Truss on some things - I can't believe she permits the apostrophe to indicate plurals in "too many but's and and's".

In other areas I am slacker - I don't see anything wrong in "author photograph" or in the double possessive, such as "John, who is a friend of the footballer's, said", which seems perfectly correct to me, as well as vivid and snappy in effect.

But on the whole she is a solid sort of stickler, guiding us through such tricky and abstruse questions as "the Oxford comma" and - one I never quite mastered - what the hell the colon is for anyway.

Why, however, has it been such an enormous success? Could anyone have thought that there was a large market for a discussion of whether you should write "sausage, chips and beans" as you do in London, or "sausage, chips, and beans," as, apparently, people do in Oxford? As she says, anyone who is interested in these matters will probably know all the useful information in this book already; anyone who actually needs the information won't be interested in buying it.

That ought to be true, but I doubt it is really the case.

There are a number of guides, such as HW Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage and Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage, which retain a steady popularity.

Those are reference books, and ones which are as enjoyable to disagree with as to learn from; I use, when I remember, Partridge, but relish it as much for its peculiar period flavour - something or other is dismissed as "a harmless vulgarism from the kitchen" - and its outdated judgements, such as the ruling that "quite" cannot mean "rather", as for any decisive authority.

After that, there are books like Miss Truss's, which lay down some strict rules in a looser way, and books like Kingsley Amis's very entertaining The King's English, inspired, apparently, by his irritation at seeing perfectly good words misused, or taking on a previously unknown meaning.

I know the feeling, and have long given up hope of ever again seeing the words "jejune", "coruscating", "oblivious" or "pristine" used in what I think of, no doubt indefensibly, their proper meaning.

Miss Truss writes about the loneliness of the stickler, forever wincing at misplaced apostrophes when no one else seems to care; the brisk sales of her book prove her, happily, wrong, and I look forward to finding out that anyone else in the world apart from me shudders when they read the sentence "the newly painted wall was completely pristine."

The striking thing is that such books, if, like Eats, Shoots and Leaves, they are good, always sell very well.

This is remarkable at a time when, for decades, no one in schools has been taught grammar or punctuation in a formal way, and we've been told that such rules are arbitrary and not very important.

If these books are not being bought entirely by readers who want their knowledge confirmed, then they are selling to people who don't accept the argument that the casual English of the untutored is quite good enough.

They want to improve, to learn, and know that their education wasn't good enough.

As it happens, I have a lot of sympathy for the view of educational practice as an intellectual proposition.

In theory, I know perfectly well that words change their meaning, for instance, through small mistakes, and after some time, when someone writes "all the critics gave X's performance coruscating reviews" it will not be an error for "excoriating" at all, but simply what the word means now.

All the same, you won't catch many good writers using "coruscating" in this sense for a long time; when they do, they will have been preceded by a vast army of pioneering berks.

And to become a good writer, to use language in a way unlikely to cause contempt in your readers, it is necessary to become acquainted with the sort of rules which you might subsequently reject.

If you know what "oblivious" actually means, you still might choose to write "she was oblivious of the murderer creeping up behind her" on the grounds that no one much cares any more.

But that's entirely different from writing "I gave the dog it's dinner" because you haven't a clue, even though in the end the two mistakes are probably about as important as each other.

The striking thing about the popularity of such books is that there is a hunger for knowledge, for factual correctness, which education is no longer fulfilling.

A parallel instance might be geographical knowledge.

An atlas is not a lot of use as a map, if you are actually travelling; nor does it really represent the sort of knowledge that a geographer would primarily be interested in.

And yet atlases sell, because they contain solid, undeniable, facts of the sort that are no longer conveyed in a modern education.

The hunger for facts, for knowledge, for correctness is an interesting phenomenon, and perhaps rather an English one.

There are few places in the world, I expect, where the pub quiz is so popular a pastime, or where some of the longest-running programmes are general knowledge quizzes with derisory prizes.

Such things have an indirect relationship with education as we understand it now; the snippets of information are not exactly useful; it is more like a national appreciation of knowledge as spectacle.

The evident hunger of rational adults for information, for general knowledge, even of a slightly naive nature, and for assurances of correctness about such things as linguistic usage has gone largely unassuaged by education in recent years.

The sort of systematic teaching of punctuation represented by Miss Truss's book is now quite rare, and first-year undergraduates, even those studying English, regularly get whose and who's, it's and its, even your and you're confused.

It is a great shock, no doubt, when people complete an education driven by the conviction that old-fashioned correctness does not ultimately matter that much, only to discover that the outside world is about to judge them by exactly those old-fashioned standards.

No wonder there is a market for books like this, which have no time for the argument that standards are relative and correctness a delusion.

We can go on assuring each other, from our elevated standpoint, that the mere existence of the possessive apostrophe in English is an absurd invention, that the proscription of the split infinitive was made up by 18th-century grammarians who didn't understand that English wasn't Latin, and that when most people come to think "oblivious" means "unaware", that is what it means.

But the market has decided otherwise.

It's noticeable, too, that the first people to denounce such notions of correctness are the last ones ever to sin against them.

- INDEPENDENT