Lynne Truss: Eats, Shoots and Leaves (2004, BBC Radio)
Audio Cassette
English language
Published May 6, 2004 by BBC Radio.
Anxious about the apostrophe? Confused by the comma? Stumped by the semicolon? Join Lynne Truss on a hilarious tour through the rules of punctuation that is sure to sort the dashes from the hyphens.
We all had the basic rules of punctuation drilled into us at school, but punctuation pedants have good reason to suspect they never sank in. ‘Its Summer!’ screams a sign that sets our teeth on edge. ‘Pansy’s ready’, we learn to our considerable interest (‘Is she?’) as we browse among the bedding plants.
It is not only the rules of punctuation that have come under attack but also a sense of why they matter. In this runaway bestseller, Lynne Truss takes the fight to emoticons and greengrocers’ apostrophes with a war cry of ‘Sticklers unite!’ ([source][1])
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.
