More’s the pity, but as I glance across this semi-prosperous land, I definitely perceive the lack of a sufficient number of spritely cheerleader-types who are willing to put their hearts and hips into punctuation. Those of us retaining fervent belief in the English language, which includes all those little squiggles, dots and slashes that accompany it, are a lengthy way beyond the pompom and posterior-pumping of our poorly spent youths. Alas and alack!

Alas: mid-13c., from O.Fr. ha, las (later Fr. hélas ), from ha "ah" + las "unfortunate," originally "tired, weary," from L. lassus "weary" (see late). Originally an expression of weariness rather than woe. Alack: (late 15c., from ah, lack , from lack (q.v.) in M.E. sense of "loss, failure, reproach, shame." Originally an expression of dissatisfaction, later of regret or surprise.) –interjection Archaic . (used as an exclamation of sorrow, regret, or dismay.) I recently read the fascinating book on punctuation written by Lynne Truss, a lovely British lady who knows her dots and dashes. Should you also wish to read it, the title of Ms Truss’s book is Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. At 209 pages (including the Bibliography), the small opus is a don’t-put-it-downer. At least, it was for me. Apparently, it was for many of her countrypersons also. The book sold 500,000 copies in the UK. It has done well in the US also. Who’d have thought a little tome written by an avowed “Stickler” for correct punctuation would become so renowned? In 2004, the U.S. edition became a New York Times bestseller. A small explanation of Ms Truss’s title might be helpful. It will also reveal what the panda on the jacket of the book is doing and why.

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, at the door. '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.'

Don’t worry. I failed to get the joke for a longish interval, too. Find a copy of the book somewhere and take a close up, deliberate look at the cover art. If you live in a small town, as I do, you can probably still find copies of it at your neighborhood book vendor’s shop or the local library. Check it out. You just may discover it nearly as captivating as I did.

Contrary to what most Americans assume, the language we share (more or less) with the Brits, the Canadians, some South Africans and every airplane pilot is a treasure without measure. And we owe the early printers in history a rousing applause for making punctuation necessary to the silent reader. Will Caxton was among the earliest of the printing ilk. He’s definitely the forerunner in England.

William Caxton (ca. 1415~1422 – ca. March 1492) was an English merchant, diplomat, writer and printer. As far as is known, he was the first English person to work as a printer and the first to introduce a printing press into England. He was also the first English retailer of printed books.

By 1438 Caxton was in London apprenticed to Robert Large, a wealthy London dealer in luxury goods, who served as Master of the Mercer's Company, and Lord Mayor of London in 1439. After Large died in 1441, Caxton was left with the small stipend of £20 and his large experience as a printer.

Early printing was a complex process involving many different kinds of materials and skills. In order to print written material on paper, a printer needed to create or obtain type; he also required compositors, ink makers, and printers. Print shops often housed many presses, depending on the size of the operation, with each press requiring two pressmen for optimal production. The variety of tasks called for many workers, including typefounders, typesetters and someone to compose the text by arranging the type into lines of words, placing the arranged type onto a wooden press, and using the intricate press mechanism to apply pressure on the inked type to impress it into dampened paper. It’s estimated that the work day consisted of 12-14 hours of grueling physical labor under poor conditions. (From The Atlas of Early Printing online: the University of Iowa) Until printing blossomed across Europe reading was strictly an oral endeavor. In monasteries and seminaries of the Church, readers educated the monks and elucidated the Bible for them by reading over dinner. Most monks were able to read for themselves and did, but the trained reader knew where to place the full-stops, miniature-stops and mere hesitations in his voice, rather like an actor. The common monk had to plow through run-on sentences and indeterminable paragraphs. A decorated capital letter was his only clue that things had changed on his page. No wonder the Bible was the first printed matter in Germany, while Will Caxton printed Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres, the first dated book (Nov 18, 1477) printed in England. The Brits were more interested in philosophy, I guess.

There are only 13 official marks in American English punctuation; they are the apostrophe, brackets, colon, comma, dash, ellipsis, exclamation point, hyphen, parentheses, period, question mark, quotation marks and semi-colon. Each of our marks comes with a set of rules. Supposedly, we learned them all in grade school. Remember any of them?

Five End-Mark Rules1.A statement is followed by a period.
2.A question is followed by a question mark.
3.An exclamation is followed by an exclamation point.
4.An imperative sentence is followed by either a period or an exclamation point.
5.An abbreviation is followed by a period.

Seven Capitalization Rules1.Capitalize the first word in every sentence.
2.Capitalize the pronoun I.
3.Capitalize the interjection O.
4.Capitalize proper nouns.
•people's names •geographical names •special events •historical events/periods •nationalities, races, religions •brand names •ships, planets, awards, specific places, things, events 5.Capitalize proper adjectives.
6.Do not capitalize the names of school subjects except languages and course names followed by a number.
7.Capitalize titles.

•title before a name •title of high official •family relationship when used with or in place of person's name •and so forthRing any bells? Incredibly boring then and just as boring now? I hear you. But strangely, Ms Truss took on the apostrophe in the first chapter of the meaningful Eats, Shoots and Leaves and somehow made it mesmerizing. There’s a common apostrophe mistake she calls “The Greengrocer’s Apostrophe” because signs in British grocers’ windows are often askew, ponctuationally speaking. Actually, it’s the misuse of singular possessive instead of a simple plural. Examples: (1) The sailor’s threw their hats in the air. (2) All toy’s reduced. (3) She lived happily without any doubt’s. You’d think all three of these examples would cause my Microsoft Word horrible case of indigestion. Nope. It let the first one through without a whimper. It probably figured sailors, being a rather unpredictable bunch, may actually own something called “threw”. Here are the right ways to use the above: The sailors threw their hats in the air. All toys reduced (in price). She lived happily without any doubts.

Ms Truss goes on to clarify the most used punctuation marks, outside of the “Tractable Apostrophe”. The comma is the most common. Ms Truss abhors the comma’s over-use. She calls editors who insert the lowly comma anywhere and everywhere “commaphilias.” I wonder if she possibly sees herself as a commaphobic. Hmmm. Phobic or not, she places her commas where they belong, where they make sense.

“Consider,” says Ms Truss in chapter two, “the difference between the following:” (From the New Testament)

“Verily, I say unto thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise.” and

“Verily I say unto thee this day, thou shalt be with me in paradise.”

Ms Truss claims the difference in comma-placement makes the first sentence Protestant; the second is, without a doubt, Catholic. Why? Because the first sentence implies “thou” will be in Heaven today no matter how sinful thou might be, since I said it to thee verily. The second is purportedly Catholic in as much as it leaves room for the idea of Purgatory before Heaven by simply removing one comma and bequeathing the second comma to its original place. The Protestants protested loudly against the idea of Purgatory and left it out of their dogma. Makes perfect sense to me.

“Everyone knows the exclamation mark – or exclamation point as it is known in America,” says Ms Truss. I read that as a kind of tomAEto-tomAHto sort of thing. At any rate, Ms Truss is much kinder to the exclamation mark than F. Scott Fitzgerald ever was. “Cut out all those exclamation marks. An exclamation mark is like laughing at your own jokes.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald —But F. Scott, there are times when the benign exclamation mark is super-necessary. What about –“Fire!” – or - “Drop the gun!”? I see no jokes in there. Even Ms Truss objects mostly to the distressing multiple exclamation marks/points used by e-mailers across the globe. Let me tell you, I see her point!!!! However, she appears to await the total demise of the exclamation mark/point. Then how ever will crime writers show their crime readers that the paper detectives and uniformed cops are real, real tough?

I’ll close this confection with two small, shy punctuation marks. The first is the hyphen. Ms Truss calls it a “funny old mark”. Woodrow Wilson claimed, “The hyphen is the most un-American thing in the world.” (Think how awkward un-American would be without its hyphen.) The little mark is probably the hardest working piece of punctuation in the entire language. This tiny “half-dash” as some think of it, joins many words that would otherwise look senseless on the page. We have to use them when we spell out numbers, such as seventy-one or twenty-five. And Ms Truss has even more reasons why we should be grateful to the short sideways punctuation. They’re in the book.

The final ode is dedicated to my sweetheart punctuation mark - the ellipsis. A single set of three dots in a line is called an ellipsis. More than one row of them on the page (not in a long train but scattered all about) is spelled “ellipses.” Don’t be concerned about it; its origin is Greek and people don’t say, “It’s Greek to me,” for no good reason. What I love about the ellipsis is that you can replace any number of words with it. If you should, perhaps, find yourself writing away and suddenly realize you are plagiarizing some big-shot writer mentioned in Publishers Weekly, simply ellipsis a good deal of it, give the tough-guy-writer his credit and keep your fingers crossed.

My favorite reason for adoring the ellipsis is that it coyly leaves things to the reader’s imagination, such as it might be. I once ended one of my unsalable novels with the knight-hero saying to the lady-heroine, “Take my hand. I’ll take you home and we’ll . . .” It could have been anything that they’d do once they arrived home; have dinner, play chess or . . .

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About the author Cate Lane: Born in Minnesota and raised a temperate progressive, I was carried off to Texas 10 years ago by the tsunami that was my husband's retirement. Texas is not Minnesota, not by a long shot. However, I hear that Minnesota isn't Minnesota anymore either.

Writing was always my first choice in life. I began writing at the age of 8, small books about pioneers heading west. Little did I know then that I would be living in the most "western" of all the states, Texas. No one told the Texans that they are simply Southerners who, like Bugs Bunny, took a wrong turn at Albuquerque and wound up here.

I am sneaking up on 70 years of age and now own a vast store of useless knowledge. Happy to share any or all of it with you all.

Email: CthlnLn@aol.com

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