Schwanksta :: Fuzzy Journalism

There’s long been a rule, known in some circles as Cheez’s First Law of the Internet (no doubt other communities have codified it in different forms), which states that while talking about someone else’s grammar or spelling, you have a nearly 90% chance of making an error.

Apparently, even the venerable New York Times isn’t immune to the natural rules we’re all governed by. In a bizarre article engaging in a little literary celebration of the semicolon and its use by a public service announcement on the subway, the article mentions Lynn Truss’s “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” a humorous book on grammar. At the bottom of the article, however, a correction appears:

Correction: February 19, 2008
An article in some editions on Monday about a New York City Transit employee’s deft use of the semicolon in a public service placard was less deft in its punctuation of the title of a book by Lynne Truss, who called the placard a “lovely example” of proper punctuation. The title of the book is “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” — not “Eats Shoots & Leaves.” (The subtitle of Ms. Truss’s book is “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”)

I can see where the writer probably made the mistake: the book’s title is based on a joke, in which a Panda shoots up a restaurant because a poorly-punctuated wildlife manual says that the mammal “eats, shoots and leaves.” The proper construction would be without the comma, as was apparently printed, but clearly the book title leaves the comma in for a reason.

I just find it amusing that the NYT would mis-punctuate the title of a grammar book in what would appear to be a slightly snobbish article on punctuation — if only for the fact that, in some circles, the use of a semicolon is probably considered snobbish in and of itself, celebrations thereof doubly-so.

And yes — this article’s title is on purpose.