PUNCTUATION PATROL

My theological-philosopher friend Evan Haskill let me borrow his copy of Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

Lynne Truss offers a delightful, yet informative tour into the history and use of grammar's little things like commas, exclamation points, colons, dashes, quotes, apostrophes, semicolons and the "full stop" (according to our British friends) or "period" to us USAmericans.

Where did these little marks originate? What were they used for at their origin? Why are they important (and Truss thinks they are very important)?

Do you know what "the Oxford comma" is?

She tells the story of a man hanged by a comma. He was trapped by a piece of legal writing with a deadly comma. As another example, Truss offers the same paragraph twice, but with different punctuation. The exact same words end up communicating very opposite messages.

Truss laments the dumbing down of correct punctuation due to Internet cyber-write, for example, the loss of capitalization, the use of --- and ... and the things like "C U B4 the game."

Don't let Truss get near signs that are wrongly punctuated...like "beets, potatoes and carrot's." Or, "used book's here." Or, worse, "used book,s here."

I done have had a reel gud timme redding the bouk. Thank yew, Evan.