When Flyspecks Matter-part I

• Publication year: 2004
• Pages: 69
• Citation: Vol. 33 No. 9 Pg. 69

33 Colo.Law. 69 Colorado Lawyer 2004.

2004, September, Pg. 69. When Flyspecks Matter-Part I

Vol. 33, No. 9, Pg. 69

The Colorado Lawyer
September 2004
Vol. 33, No. 9 [Page 69]

Departments
The Scrivener: Modern Legal Writing
When Flyspecks Matter - Part I
by K. K. DuVivier
C 2004 K.K. DuVivier

K.K. DuVivier is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Lawyering Process Program at the University of Denver College of Law

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."1

The story above inspired the title of Eats, Shoots & Leaves,2 a British bestseller on punctuation. Its author, Lynne Truss, includes this story as a dramatic example of how significant an errant comma can be. By adding the comma, the wildlife manual potentially converted "shoots and leaves" into a list of verbs. Instead, the manual intended them as direct objects, nouns serving to show what kind of plant matter the panda eats.

While this example is amusing, everyone knows that, despite the added comma, the wildlife manual was describing the panda's diet. Pandas do not pack guns and, if they did, would not be shooting them in cafés. Thus, instead of reinforcing the author's premise, the panda story may illustrate the weakness of assertions that most punctuation significantly controls meaning.

A Short History of Punctuation

Let's first go into some of the fascinating history of punctuation that author Truss serves up in the book. In the early days of writing, we had only scripto continua, roughly translated as "continuous script." With this form of text, the words flow together continuously without spacing between them. Not only were there no divisions between words, but likewise there were no signals for divisions of sentences or within sentences: no initial capitalization and no punctuation. Meaning was entirely dependent on context.3

The Greeks are credited with the earliest known punctuation Around 200 B.C., Aristophanes of Byzantium created...