Truss: to secure tightly; see BIND

[ornoth]

So after much delay, I finally sat down and read Lynne Truss’ extremely popular “Eats, Shoots & Leaves”.

As both a writer and an editor, I naturally approached the book with certain expectations: her correction of common misconceptions, a tone of authority, and clear, correct, and entertaining explanations of grammatical rules. I think that’s a fair set of expectations for a work subtitled “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”, and which describes itself as “The Runaway #1 British Bestseller”.

Frau Truss—anyone pontificating on grammar should be referred to by a German title—does start out quite strongly, dealing right up front with the marks whose use is most prone to error. She begins by devoting an entire chapter to a justifiably militant tirade against misuse of the apostrophe, which is sadly epidemic. She goes into quite a bit of detail on both the apostrophe and the comma, citing specific usage rules chapter and verse.

Even her section on colons and semicolons is reasonably clear, although not nearly so concisely put as the rules in my 2002 Missive to the DargonZine Writers on the Colon and Semicolon.

However, from that point on, Truss’ book goes all pear-shaped, as she explains that exclamation points and question marks should be used at will to control meter and tone, as if proper punctuation were subject to postmodern revisionism and prose was just another form of interpretive dance.

Most frustratingly, Truss proceeds to expound on italics, quotation marks, dashes, parentheses, ellipses, and hyphens, but gives the reader little more instruction than “These marks all mystify me”. Where are the rules of usage and the research behind them that were all cited in earlier chapters? Why bother including chapters on all these marks when you have no insight into their proper usage?

But the book does, after all, have panda bears on its cover, so that makes everything alright [sic], doesn’t it?

Actually, what does make it all right is that any progress in getting people to properly operate their own language is a Good Thing. However, it’s probably unrealistic to expect a single book to have any great impact upon such a longstanding and pervasive problem, since proscriptive writers and editors have been railing about public misuse for several centuries with no appreciable effect.