I still have no idea whether sticklers are uniting in the UK, but I somehow doubt it, despite the staggering sales. Grammatical sticklers are the worst people for finding common cause because it is in their nature (obviously) to pick holes in everyone, even their best friends. Honestly, what an annoying bunch of people. One supporter of Eats, Shoots & Leaves wrote a 1,400-word column in The Times of London explaining (with glorious self-importance) that while his admiration for my purpose was “total”, he disagreed with virtually everything I said. So I am not sure my stickler-chums are, as I write this, sitting down to get things sorted out. What did become depressingly clear, however, was that my personal hunches about the state of the language were horribly correct: standards of punctuation in general in the UK are indeed approaching the point of illiteracy; self-justified philistines (“Get a life!”) are truly in the driving seat of our culture; and a lot of well-educated sensitive people really have been weeping friendlessly in caves for the past few years, praying for someone—anyone—to write a book about punctuation with a panda on the cover.
I don’t know how bad things are in America, but in the UK I cannot emphasise it enough: standards of punctuation are abysmal. Encouraged to conduct easy tests on television, I discovered to my horror that most British people truly do not know their apostrophe from their elbow. “I’m an Oxbridge intellectual,” slurred a chap in Brighton, where we were asking passers-by to “pin the apostrophe on the sentence” for a harmless afternoon chat-show. He immediately placed an apostrophe (oh no!) in a possessive “its”. The high-profile editor of a national newspaper made the same mistake on a morning show, scoring two correct points out of a possible seven. On a TV news bulletin, the results of a vox pop item were shown on screen under the heading “Grammer Test”—the spelling of which I assumed was a joke until I realised nobody in the studio was laughing. Meanwhile well-wishers sent hundreds of delightful/horrific examples of idiotic sign-writing, my current favourite being the roadside warning CHILDREN DRIVE SLOWLY—courtesy of the wonderful Shakespearean actor Timothy West. Evidently, this sign—inadvertently descriptive of the disappointing road speeds attainable by infants at the wheel—was eventually altered (but sadly not improved) by the addition of a comma, becoming CHILDREN, DRIVE SLOWLY—a kindly exhortation, perhaps, which might even save lives among those self-same reckless juvenile road-users; but still not quite what the writer really had in mind.
By far the oddest and most demoralising response to my book, however, took place at a book-shop event in Piccadilly. It is a story that, if nothing else, proves the truth of that depressing old adage about taking a horse to water. I was signing copies of my book when a rather bedraggled woman came up and said, despairingly, “Oh, I’d love to learn about punctuation.” Spotting a sure thing (you know how it is), I said with a little laugh, “Then this is the book for you, madam!” I believe my pen actually hovered above the dedication page, as I waited for her to tell me her name.
“No, I mean it,” she insisted—as if I had dis-agreed with her. “I really would love to know how to do it. I mean, I did learn it at school, but I’ve forgotten it now, and it’s awful. I put all my commas in the wrong place, and as for the apostrophe . . . !” I nodded, still smiling. This all seemed familiar enough. “So shall I sign it to anyone in particular?” I said. “And I’m a teacher,” she went on. “And I’m quite ashamed really, not knowing about grammar and all that; so I’d love to know about punctuation, but the trouble is, there’s just nowhere you can turn, is there?”
This was quite unsettling. She shrugged, defeated, and I hoped she would go away. I said again that the book really did explain many basic things about punctuation; she said again that the basic things of punctuation were exactly what nobody was ever prepared to explain to an adult person. I must admit, I started to wonder feverishly whether I was being secretly filmed by publishers of rival punctuation books who had set up the whole thing. I even wondered briefly: had any author in Hatchards (a bookseller established in 1797) ever hit a customer, or was I destined to be the first? Throughout the encounter, I kept smiling at her and nodding at the book, but she never took the hint. In the end, thank goodness, she slid away, leaving me to put my coat over my head and scream.
It was the same kind of strenuous apathy, I suppose, that I refer to on page 33, drawing on the deathless line in Woody Allen’s Small Time Crooks: “I’ve always wanted to know how to spell Connecticut.” I tend to feel that if a person genuinely wants to know how to spell Connecticut, you see, they will make efforts to look it up. Or, failing that, if a book announcing itself as The Only Way to Spell Connecticut is This is to be found in heaps on a table in front of them, they will think, “Hang on, I might get this!” But it turns out there are people whom you simply cannot help, because it suits them to say, with a shrug, “Do you know, I’ve always wanted to know how to use an apostrophe—and oh dear, I don’t know how to wash my hair either.” The fact that these people are sometimes editors of national newspapers and Oxbridge intellectuals is just an indication of how low our society’s intellectual aspirations have sunk.
It is customary in the UK, incidentally, to blame all examples of language erosion on the pernicious influence of the US. Certainly American spellings are creeping in to our shop signs (GLAMOR GIRL! I noticed in a huge chain pharmacy over Christmas— where it ought to have been “Glamour” with a “u”). But in the case of our deteriorating understanding of commas and apostrophes, we have no one to blame but ourselves. While significant variations exist between British and American usage, these are matters for quite rarefied concern. You say “parentheses” while we say “brackets” (see page 160)—but to people who call an apostrophe “one of them floating comma things” it doesn’t matter very much. They are unlikely to spot that American usage interestingly places all terminal punctuation inside closing quotation marks, while British usage some-times “picks and chooses”. (Like that.) People who identify “that dot-thing” as the mark at the end of a sentence probably don’t care that the American “period” is the equivalent of the British “full stop”, or that “exclamation point” is the US way of saying “exclamation mark”. We probably don’t use the term “inverted commas” as much as we used to in Britain, but nobody in America has forced us to give them up.
My American correspondents, however, have made it pretty clear that the US is not immune to similar levels of public illiteracy. Carved in stone (in stone, mind you) in a Florida shopping mall one may see the splendidly apt quotation from Euripides, “Judge a tree from it’s fruit: not the leaves”—and it is all too easy to imagine the stone-mason dithering momentarily over that monumental apostrophe, mallet in hand, chisel poised. Can an apostrophe ever be wrong, he asks himself, as he answers “Nah!” and decisively strikes home and the chips fly out. Meanwhile a casual drive in America is quite as horrifying to a stickler as it is in the UK. CHILDRENS HOME; READERS OUTLET; PLEASE DO NOT LOCK THIS DOOR BETWEEN THE HOUR’S OF 9AM AND 6:30PM.
Might the tide turn, however? Are there any reasons to be cheerful on behalf of punctuation? Well, there is one—and although modesty ought to forbid me from mentioning it, it is the astonishing response Eats, Shoots & Leaves has had in the UK. Some may say that the British are obsessed with class difference and that knowing your apostrophes is a way of belittling the uneducated. To which accusation, I say (mainly), “Pah!” How can it be a matter of class difference when ignorance is universal?