LOOKING AT THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE CRITICALLY

By Barbara Scott

I was amused by your piece about the complexity of the English language. I know only too well how confusing this is to someone who is learning English as a second language. It is not until you look at your own language through a foreigner's eyes that you realise why they say it is the hardest language to learn! Well, here is something else that might interest your readers. There is a very amusing and informative book written by a journalist called Lynne Truss called Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. As a writer and journalist, Truss realised how often improper punctuation can make all the difference to the sense of sentence. An example of this is the clue to the title of the book:

A panda walks into a bar. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why? Why are you behaving in this strange, un-panda-like fashion?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda walks 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 an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

There are many more examples of how poor punctuation can alter the meaning of a sentence or passage completely. Also, the ubiquitous 'apostrophe' is one of my pet hates. There is a golden rule that I learned at school and that is to only put in an apostrophe if it is appropriate. ie: if it is a possesive noun (Barbara's book) or if it is to replace the letter i in an abbreviation (where's my book?). So many people use it as a plural as in a sign I saw recently in a shop window advertising a sale. It read ALL SHIRT'S HALF PRICE! Urrrrrrgh! How irritating is that, especially as it was in big red lettering in a very well known store! If in doubt leave it out is the best advice. Having worked for a newspaper I was always aware that if something was spelt or punctuated wrongly it was nearly always on the front page as a headline and in

72pt bold type!!!!