Eats, Shoots, & Leaves, (Truss)

Eats, Shoots, & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, Lynne Truss, 2003

With a title like that, accompanied by cover art featuring a homicidal panda, not to mention reviews I seen, I had to get a copy of this book because I was sure it would be a hysterically funny read.

It was not. It was the most dry book I'd read in quite some time. I guess I was expecting something along the line of William Safire's On Language columns. This was much more straight-forward and no-nonsense -- despite the book's title. Not to say that the author didn't make some excellent points on punctuation, she did. It just wasn't as enjoyable as I had hoped.

However, there's one anecdote that stands out in my mind. Truss takes "Warner Brothers" to take over the movie, Two Weeks Notice, which should have an apostrophe: Two Weeks' Notice. She returns to that point several times and mentions "Warner Brothers" quite a few times. What Truss fails to realize is that Warner Bros. is spelled with a period.

(I know that because I read it in Safire's column.)