Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss

This book has been on my radar for a while. I do not remember when I first came across the name, but recently a friend had tagged it on Goodreads and I finally got around to borrowing it ( the Goodreads thing jogged my memory and pushed me into action).

English is my go-to language on a daily basis though there are others jostling around in my head. Being most coherent in English, I was smug in an unjustified satisfaction that I knew right from wrong, ninety percent of the time with regards to grammar or punctuations. This book made me realize that I have knowingly been blind to certain mistakes that I have been making all my adult life. The fact that I never used a plural possessive apostrophe in anything I have written, makes me doubt the validity of a lot of what I have written thus far. This is a funny book and the author has a fun narrative tone. An added bonus are the quirky anecdotes which would come as a pleasant surprise to anyone who does not really know how English Grammar as we have come to know, came to be.

Despite all the information, and probably because of it, I am second guessing every punctuation mark I have used in this review.( The same fear voiced in the foreword written by Frank McCourt, which I did not realize I would be echoing at the completion of the book)

Words whose meaning I was not sure of( or not heard in a while):

• Poncey :pretentious or affected
• Solecism:a grammatical mistake in speech or writing.
• Perspicuity:clearness or lucidity, as of a statement.
• Baroque: relating to or denoting a style of European architecture, music, and art of the 17th and 18th centuries that followed Mannerism and is characterized by ornate detail.