Oh! behave

Sometimes I think maybe I’ve made too much of this,” muses Lynne Truss, clearly still astonished that some readers don’t believe that Eats, Shoots and Leaves was written very much with tongue in cheek. ‘I thought the subtitle — The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation — was hilarious because it’s so obvious that punctuation is a relatively minor thing in life.”

It wasn’t so obvious to the endless ranks of curmudgeons who earnestly decried her as a humourless grammarian with no sense of proportion. As far as I can tell this is not a woman who thinks that a misplaced semicolon ranks on the same scale of disaster as, say, a tsunami. Truss solemnly assures me that despite whatever she may have said in the book, she has in fact never chopped anyone into quarters and buried them in an unmarked grave for incorrect apostrophe usage. (I nonetheless resolve to bribe the chief sub-editor with a kilogramme of Swiss chocolate to ensure this story contains no peripatetic punctuation marks.) ‘Only on the apostrophe can one be rigid anyway, otherwise a lot of it is more of an art than a science.”

After Truss tackled poor punctuation, she followed up with a broadside on bad manners in Talk to the Hand, subtitled The Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life [or six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door]. After those, I eagerly anticipated the Truss scalpel being turned on various other annoyances afflicting contemporary existence. But she informs me she has no plans to write another ‘what not to do” book: ‘It’ll be a while before I tell everyone how to behave — it’s so difficult having a reputation as an uber-stickler. It’s a bit tiring because people think there are no other aspects to you,” she pauses for a beat and adds, ‘but I’m sure people really like me telling them off.”

Truss is charming, funny and gives the impression of correcting silliness not because her ego demands that she has to, but because her common sense won’t allow her not to.

‘Talk to the Hand was really about frustration and feelings of impotence in situations where you can’t do anything, but you’re thinking ‘Surely they shouldn’t be shaving their legs on the train?’, and you’re all alone with that feeling. It’s not so much about ticking people off as feeling ‘I hope I die soon because I can’t really cope with the way things are going,’” she says deadpan.

Right on cue, in an alcove off the hotel lounge in which we are seated, a stereotypically loud American starts bellowing into his cellphone, while tapping away at his laptop with one hand and simultaneously stuffing food into his face with the other. As he drowns out our conversation with commands and demands to some underling on the other side of the world, I watch Truss eagerly for any signs that she might stroll over and sort him out. Sadly she seems disinclined to do so, so we move out to the poolside, feeling impotent to deal with this boorish behaviour.

She perceives a clear link between declining standards of punctuation and civility, seeing misspelled, badly punctuated writing as a lack of consideration. ‘It’s about transferring the effort. If you send something to someone and they have to deal with the effort of working it out, I do think that’s rude. What makes me cross is that it gives the reader too much work to do — if you are writing something you have to make it clear. Words without punctuation are like music without notation. You can put the notes down but you can’t say ‘speed up here’ or ‘louder’— it would be a great loss to music if it all sounded plink-plonk, plink-plonk.”

A novelist, and award-winning columnist, Truss is clearly someone who takes great pleasure in crafting the language. ‘I’m not really bothered at all about grammar, I just care about communication. Punctuation marks could be replaced with figures or smileys or whatever as long as you can still deliver, in your writing, something about rhythm and expression.

‘Being a journalist, what you are trying to do all the time is thwart the sub-editor, so you don’t give them anything to do and try not to let them interfere with your work — the better you make it the less chance there is of something going wrong.”

She is gently dismissive of the notion that all this is socially irrelevant. ‘What I hate so much about the whole debate is the idea that it’s elitist to care about this issue. The biggest engine for social mobility is literacy. By the time I came along, you could start off from a very poor background but if you could read and write, you could use your intelligence and get on with it. So if you tell a large portion of the population that they don’t need to know this stuff, what does that do? It’s actually taking away opportunities. It is still being taught in fee-paying schools to people with money, so it [not teaching grammar] just reinforces the class system — it doesn’t actually make it more equal.”

A children’s edition of Eats, Shoots and Leaves has just been published, subtitled Why, commas really do make a difference! with cartoon illustrations of how comma placement changes meaning. ‘Think of the first line of Moby-Dick,” she chuckles. ‘If you put in a comma it becomes ‘Call me, Ishmael’. Don’t be a stranger.”