Paperback, 209 pages
English language
Published Jan. 6, 2005 by Profile Books.
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds and explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
So, punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death. --back cover
Amusing and erudite but also shows exactly why punctuation will never be 'right'!!!!!!!!
A humorous look at the ignorance of the masses with regard to grammatical faux pas.
A larger than expected crowd, with a couple of people who had just moved to the neighborhood and had seen the notice in the neighborhood rag. A mostly favorable reaction, although that might have been because the evening attracted people who already liked the book. We were largely self-confessed sticklers, for either punctuation, spelling, or grammar. (And look!, right there was an Oxford comma.)
Carolyn described how the audio book had been done - with an American reader (She would have preferred a Brit.) spelling out the punctuaion in the examples, but also using inflection.
The discussion was lively, and ranged from how to insert an en-dash in Word, to people's pet language peeves, reaching, near the end, the French subjunctive mood, which is about as far as any conversation could be expected to go.
