No Laughing Matter

I like grammar. I like speaking correctly, I like pointing out when people are wrong, and I even enjoy teaching the writing section to my SAT students. But I am nowhere near as fanatical as Lynn Truss and her target readership are. For instance, I don't always punctuate my emails correctly. I certainly don't always speak in complete sentences via text. And while some anecdotes and histories are interesting, I just don't care all that much at the end of the day about the five century journey of the semi-colon, or the fading glory of the hyphen. If you do, then you absolutely must read this book. If you don't, you might find it interesting still. If you were turned off by the first sentence, then its not for you at all.

My mom recommended this to me as a light read, and since the joke of the books title (a panda walks into a bar...) is one of the many in my corny joke arsenal, so the bok has been on my radar for a while. And while it was in fact a light, breezy read (great for the john!) the histories that make up most of the substance of the writing (of the period, the comma, the colon, etc. complete with origin and proper usage) get really repetitive and boring after a while. My favorite part of the book are the everyday examples that drove Truss nuts enough to force her (seemingly) to write this instructional tome. Stuff like apostrophes at the green grocers (or green grocer's, or green grocers') in the fruit: pear's, 2.99, etc. I love finding these in everyday life, so this appealed to me most of all (a running joke with my friend Dan is the sign in front of his old apartment that read "Please notice there is no parking in the driveway", and almost nightly i walk by a sign at a cuban restaurant warning "Restrooms only for customers", which I'm sure would cause Truss to wonder why the restaurant won't also offer it's customers food or a table).