| By Neil Dyson Consider the two sentences: "A woman, without her man, is nothing" and "A woman: without her, man is nothing" By simply replacing a comma with a colon we end up with two completely different statements, and this is the essence of Lynn Truss's bestselling book Eats, Shoots and Leaves. Seeing Lynn Truss talk made for an entertaining hour. Her book is full of analogies similar to the one above; from the use of commas to apostrophise to semi-colons, and she highlighted numerous examples of them to the packed Oxford debating chamber. Her book wasn't supposed to be such a success, and she readily admitted that it had caught her out by surprise. I'm sure it found itself in many Christmas stockings this year, and it's being translated and adapted for countries around the world. On the face of it a book about punctuation doesn't sound too exciting, but it is well worth a read. Consider now the recent London Underground campaign to encourage people to report suspicious packages. The (current) posters read: "Don't touch, check with other passengers, inform station staff, or call 999" On the first glance this seems like a perfectly logical request; if you see a suspicious package you need to do one of the above. But if you read it again, what it actually asks you to do is NONE of the things it lists! The misuse of the comma has completely turned such a serious request on its head. What Lynn Truss tried to emphasise was that on the whole, people will get things wrong every so often. No one is perfect, and people make mistakes. But when it's establishments like our government making such elementary mistakes then you really do need to ask yourself if enough people have a good enough grip of punctuation, or if we all need to be forced to read her eye-opening book?
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