East Coast Kahuna

Eats Shoots and Leaves

You must have heard this joke: A panda sits in a cafe having his lunch. He eats a sandwich, fires a gun at another customer and walks towards the exit. When the waiter asks him in confusion what he’s doing, the panda throws him a badly punctuated book on wildlife. "Here, look me up in the book," the panda replies. In the book, it's written, “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

What brought this to mind was a recent best selling book by Lynne Truss called Eats, Shoots & Leaves. The subject of the book is the decline of correct punctuation in written English. This joke illustrates the incorrect placement of a comma. Although the book was written in the UK and discusses English English, it is very pertinent in the US relating to a similar problem American English. The book is selling well in the US. I wonder how many people who buy the book actually read it. The title is catchy and may surprise someone who doesn't look further into the book to see what it's actually about.

I hadn't realized how bad the problem of incorrect punctuation. I personally am also a stickler for detail in writing and have been annoyed/amused by the abused sentences that I've seen. I've edited and written more than my share of newsletters for many organizations and I take pride in attempting to write things out correctly. I am appalled by a lot of the shorthand jargon and deliberate mispellings in email and chat messages - many people think they save time by writing this way (although I find it takes longer to read and figure out some of the messages). Other abusers write this way because they thing it "kewl" (i.e., "cool"). Email is international, so I suspect that there may be a similar degeneration going on in other languages. Incidently, I admire people who try to write in English, although it may not be their native language - they want to make it easier for the reader. In this case, I forgiving of any errors that they may have.

In Hawaii, in addition to common punctuational errors, there is a general problem with proper English. Instead of making the effort improve, the general population seems to embrace "pidgin" English as the local dialect and is "proud" of it. Publications deliberately emphasizing pidgin are rampant on the shelves of local bookstores. I was fortunate to have attended private school and learned proper English usage. For even conscientious students, verbal SAT scores for Hawaii residents are generally at least 100 points lower than they should be. Peer pressure is actually against anyone who might try to speak and write properly.

I might seem harsh in my criticism of English misuse in Hawaii - but that's how I remember it.

posted by tjh14850 @ 2:00 PM