Lynne Truss’s surprise bestseller on punctuation deserves every bit
of its success, as far as I’m concerned. It hasn’t been universally
well received, as she’s been accused of pedantry and tedious one track
mindedness. But for this reader what transformed the book was her
combative approach and her truly wonderful turn of phase. This makes
it difficult to write about her book without continually resorting to
quoting from it.
Lynne Truss thinks that punctuation matters, that it really
matters. ‘What happens when it isn’t used? Well, if punctuation is the
stitching of language, language comes apart, obviously, and all the
buttons fall off. If punctuation provides the traffic signals, words bang
into each other and everyone ends up in Minehead.’
Truss takes it all seriously. Chapter by chapter, she shows how
the punctuation marks originated and how they are used and misused today.
She starts with the much-abused apostrophe ‘the tractable apostrophe
has always done its proper jobs in our language with enthusiasm and
elegance, but it has never been taken seriously enough… In fact one
might say that while the full stop is the lumpen male of the punctuation
world (do one job at a time; do it well; forget about it instantly), the
apostrophe is the frantically multi-tasking female, dotting hither and
yon, and succumbing to burnout from all the thankless effort.’
She enters the shoals of comma use and sorts out all those commas,
including the notorious Oxford comma, in trenchant form, then goes on to
colons and semi-colons: ‘Perspicuity and beauty of composition are not
to be sneezed at in this rotten world. If colons and semi-colons give
themselves airs and graces, at least they also confer airs and graces that
the language would be lost without.’
Moving on to exclamation marks, she gets entertainingly exercised:
‘In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma
is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed
hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets
over-excited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.’
But her real passion is for the necessity of punctuation, the reason
why it really matters: ‘we should fight like tigers to preserve our
punctuation… Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear
thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is
unimaginable.’
I can only cheer her on.
