Lynne Truss has a new book out about punctuation — and it’s a #1 best seller in Britain. The initial printing was 15,000, but “Eats, Shoots & Leaves” is now up to 510,000 in print. I enjoy language in any case, but the book looks appealing on its own:
There are many possible reasons for the tremendous success of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves,” a spritely volume that leads the reader through the valley of the shadow of comma splice; refers to the apostrophe as “our long-suffering little friend”; makes a rousing case for the semicolon's usefulness in, among other things, “calling a bunch of brawling commas to attention”; and describes Woodrow Wilson's inexplicable visceral hatred of the hyphen, which he called � spectacularly undermining his own argument — “the most un-American thing in the world.” […]
And, if you haven’t heard the joke about the panda going into a bar (from where the book got its title), it's explained at the end of the article ;).
(Due credit: Media Bistro’s Daily Media News newsletter)