Eats, Shoots and Leaves

Here's a link to the website for Eats, Shoots and Leaves, subtitled - and I'm sure Jackie will love this - "a zero-tolerance approach to punctuation."

The original (if expurgated!) version of the title story:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

So punctuation really does matter, even if it is only occasionally a matter of life and death!

Punctuation, however, hasn't always existed. It developed out of necessity!

Commas, for example, were apparently first used by Greek playwrights to mark "breathing points" for actors.

"Thus leading," Lynne Truss writes, "to the modern explanation of why a cat is not a comma..." Personally, I'm not sure why we'd even need such an explanation, but - for the sake of a learning opportunity - I'm willing to suspend disbelief! :-)

A cat has claws at the end of its paws;
A comma's a pause at the end of a clause!

And I thought history humor was bad! :-)