General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFor those who think grammar is trivial
Remember this before posting in Republicanese instead of English:
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tblue37
(65,477 posts)nycbos
(6,035 posts)Deb
(3,742 posts)hlthe2b
(102,331 posts)DFW
(54,428 posts)They shoot back.
central scrutinizer
(11,659 posts)I'm going to help my uncle jack off his horse.
Kingofalldems
(38,468 posts)DFW
(54,428 posts)It is specifically mentioned that "then" and "than" are to be used at random, and not in context as in English.
niyad
(113,513 posts)Eats, Shoots & Leaves
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is written like a personal reflection or opinion essay that states a Wikipedia editor's personal feelings about a topic. Please help improve it by rewriting it in an encyclopedic style. (March 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation ES&L.png
Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation is a non-fiction book written by Lynne Truss, the former host of BBC Radio 4's Cutting a Dash programme. In the book, published in 2003, Truss bemoans the state of punctuation in the United Kingdom and the United States and describes how rules are being relaxed in today's society. Her goal is to remind readers of the importance of punctuation in the English language by mixing humour and instruction.
Truss dedicates the book "to the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg who, in 1905, demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution"; she added this dedication as an afterthought after finding the factoid in a speech from a librarian.[1]
There is one chapter each on apostrophes; commas; semicolons and colons; exclamation marks, question marks, and quotation marks; italic type, dashes, brackets, ellipses and emoticons; and the last one on hyphens. Truss touches on varied aspects of the history of punctuation and includes many anecdotes, which add another dimension to her explanations of grammar. In the book's final chapter, she opines on the importance of maintaining punctuation rules and addresses the damaging effects of email and the Internet on punctuation.
Irish American author Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes, wrote the foreword to the US edition of Eats, Shoots & Leaves. In keeping with the general lighthearted tone of the book, he praises Truss for bringing life back into the art of punctuation, adding, "If Lynne Truss were Roman Catholic I'd nominate her for sainthood."
The book was a commercial success. In 2004, the US edition became a New York Times best-seller. Contrary to usual publishing practice, the US edition of the book left the original British conventions intact.
Title
The title of the book is a syntactic ambiguity??a verbal fallacy arising from an ambiguous grammatical construction??and derived from a joke about bad punctuation:
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.
"Why?" asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"Well, I'm a panda," he says. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
. . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves
Henry Krinkle
(208 posts)[img][/img]
rsdsharp
(9,195 posts)mascot have to do with this?
whopis01
(3,522 posts)So if they knew their shit, maybe we wouldnt all know theyre shit.
(No offense to the Bucs - I am a fan. But that was too good to pass up.)
onecent
(6,096 posts)Roland99
(53,342 posts)In Florida, I trust the Republican State Legislature to pass a bill allowing house pets to have firearms, and for underage pet owners to buy them as birthday presents.
packman
(16,296 posts)DFW
(54,428 posts)[URL=.html][IMG][/IMG][/URL]
eppur_se_muova
(36,280 posts)Motley13
(3,867 posts)A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
Two quotation marks walk into a bar.
A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
A question mark walks into a bar?
A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."
A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
A synonym strolls into a tavern.
At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
A dyslexic walks into a bra.
A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television getting drunk and smoking cigars.
A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.
DFW
(54,428 posts)Did you find these somewhere, or did you spend 36 hours putting them together?
And who is the genius who thought up the dyslexia excuse?
Motley13
(3,867 posts)they got it from somewhere else also
DFW
(54,428 posts)True Dough
(17,314 posts)in that sign...