Adhoc Labs Readers discussion

I just finished Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Which is basically a book about 5 punctation marks written by a pretentious British asshole. It's hilarious. Here's a sample of flavor:

When I was about fourteen years old, a friend at school who spent the summer holidays in Michigan set me up with an American pen-pal. This is not an episode I am proud to remember. In fact, one day I hope to be able to forget it: the ensuing correspondence, after all, ran to only three pages, and no one from the Oxford University Press has, as yet, suggested collecting it in book form with scholarly apparatus and footnotes. But for the time being I need to get it off my chest, so here it is. The trouble was, Kerry-Anne was an everyday teenager with no literary pretensions – and for some reason this made the precocious blue-stocking in me feverishly uncomfortable. When her first letter arrived (she had pluckily set the ball rolling) I was absolutely appalled. It was in huge handwriting, like an infant’s. It was on pink paper, with carefree spelling errors – and where the dots over the I’s ought to be, there were bubbles. “I am strawberry blonde,” she wrote, “with a light dusting of freckles.” In hindsight I see it was unrealistic to expect a pen-pal from the 8th grade in Detroit to write like Samuel Johnson. But on the other hand, what earthly use to me was this vapid mousey moron parading a pig-mentational handicap?

To this day I am ashamed of what I did to Kerry-Anne (who unsurprisingly never wrote back). I replied to her childish letter on grown-up deckled green paper with a fountain pen. Whether I actually donned a velvet smoking jacket for the occasion I can’t remember, but I know I deliberately dropped the word “desultory”,and I think I may even have used some French. Pretentious? Well, to adapt Gustave Flaubert’s famous identification with Emma Bovary, “Adrian Mole, âgé de treize ans et trois quarts . . . c’est moi.” The main reason I recall this shameful teenage epiphany, however, is that in my mission to blast little Kerry-Anne out of the water, I pulled out (literally) all the stops: I used a semicolon. “I watch television in a desultory kind of way; I find there is not much on,” I wrote. And it felt so good, you know. It felt fantastic. It was like that bit in Crocodile Dundee when our rugged hero scoffs at the switchblade of his would-be mugger, and produces a foot-long weapon of his own, “Call that a knife? THAT’s a KNIFE.”


While I wouldn't say it was the best book i've ever read, certainly it's the best book on punctuation i've ever read.

Definitely adding this one to my list. It reads so... English.