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Tuesday, January 20, 2004


Eats, Shoots, and Leaves
This book is supposedly an international best seller, and is supposed to hit America in April. We hope.

The Brits probably already know about this book. I've heard that it's quite amusing, but the author doesn't know how to correct her own writing, because she missed lots and lots of punctuation errors herself!

The book is titled Eats, Shoots and Leaves and it's about punctuation. In the forward of the book, there's a little anecdote that goes with it. This is a brief summary of it, from what I heard over the phone about it (my dad was talking to me about it on the weekend).

A panda walks into a restaurant, sits down, asked for the menu, orders and eats his food, etc. He gets up to leave, and fires two shots from a pistol.

The frightened restaurant owner goes up to the panda, now at the door, about to leave. He asks "What the hell do you think you're doing? You haven't even paid for your food!"

The panda shrugs and says, "I'm a panda, it's what I do. Look it up."

So the restaurant owner looks it up in a dictionary, and the dictionary tells him:

Pan•da (common noun) A bear native to China. Has black fur, with white on the stomach and face. Black markings around the eyes. Eats shoots and leaves.


The whole point of that was, is that if you place a comma between "eats" and "shoots", you imply a series of events. Without a comma suggests the dietary habits (bamboo shoots, bamboo leaves).

I'm eager to see how good (or bad) this book really is. I doubt I'll notice the punctuation errors, though. XD

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