Comma il faut

If my editors ever wanted to put pressure on me, all they would have to do is make a tiny change to the name of this column by adding an apostrophe.

The shame of reading 'Speaking Volume's', for instance, would be enough to bring me to my knees, blubbing like a baby, promising that I would do anything, anything at all to remove such an abomination from the page.

Of course they would never actually do this, I think "" a little nervously, perhaps, but then I have faith in the Editors.

They have inner punctuation sticklers, too; they would empathise with Lynne Truss when she writes: "Part of one's despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation."

Neither Truss nor her publishers realised just how many sensitive sticklers were suffering in silence before Eats, Shoots & Leaves came out.

Her publishers had planned what they considered a generous print run of 15,000 copies, only to be told by bookstores that this was nowhere near enough. Fifty thousand copies was more like it, doubled, then trebled.

There has been nothing quite like this since Anne Fadiman's word-of-mouth success: no one in the trade expected a book on, of all things, punctuation, to become the next big thing.

Part of the reason for the book's success is Truss's approach. (Yes, it's "Truss's', not 'Truss' ".

She explains why, with commendable thoroughness.). Her favourite definition of punctuation is the one offered by the style book of a national newspaper: that punctuation is a "courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling".

"Isn't the analogy with good manners perfect?" continues Truss. "Truly good manners are invisible: they ease the way for others, without drawing attention to themselves."

Amen, I said to myself when I read that. It was a perfect reader's moment; the point at which you realise that you're in the hands of someone you like and trust. Nor is she a severe, humourless punctuation tyrant.

She weighs in somewhere between the kind of linguist who shrugs his shoulders at changing standards, remarking only that of course language will change, perhaps even die, and the "severely prescriptive grammarians" who believe that writers who omit the cedilla or mix up their commas should be burned at the stake.

This bit is very reassuring to a reader like me, who lives in a world of constant confusion. On the one hand, my inner stickler is alive and kicking.

It says severe things to people who mix up "its" and "it's".(If you can say the sentence with an "it is", then use "it's"; if not, use "its".

It's really that simple.) My stickler writhes in anguish at signs advertising 'Sweater's Sale'. Who is the person with a perspiration problem, it wants to know, and what is he selling? A headline like 'Sonia and her cow dust hour' has my inner stickler whimpering.

"Sonia, and her (brown?) cow, dust hour by hour, but there's always more to do," is how it would like to complete that sentence. And it was most traumatised by the headline that went 'Riding the Feel-Good'.

The Feel-Good what? Should Feel-Good be hyphenated at all? Should it be two words? Shouldn't it be lower case? There was a definite Feel-Bad Effect at work by the time my stickler had finished with that, I can tell you.

On the other hand, I'm no punctuation genius. I routinely use semi-colons where colons would be in place; or worse still "" I overuse the dash.

I have relatively little trouble with apostrophes, but I am notoriously careless with the comma, and have been known to omit the cedilla completely on the grounds that locating the character map key for that irritating 'c' is too much trouble.

Any sentence written by me that ends in an exclamation mark, especially when it closes a paragraph or a column, is a dead giveaway: what it's really saying is, "I don't have a punchy way to end this damn thing, so I'm going to pretend that what I just said is funny"!

And my standards are just as lax when it comes to other people. Truss cites a printed banner that says 'Come inside for CD's, VIDEO'S, DVD'S, and BOOK's'.

It elicits the same gasp of horror in me that it does in her; it has the potential to ruin my day completely. I see the possibilities in a sentence that can be read several ways. (The convict said the judge is mad. The convict, said the judge, is mad.)

But I am forgiving to the potential groom who uses the semi-colon with bold abandon in this line from his matrimonial advertisement: "She should be social, warm, caring, spiritual, adaptable, non-smoker; and look forward to having children."

Set aside for a moment the niggling sense that another "and" is required after "adaptable", quell the voices of sticklers who would suggest that a semi-colon was not really required.

The man knows what he wants: he sets out first the lady's qualities and then uses the semi-colon as a drumroll to announce that we have arrived at the most important attribute of his future bride.

He may not be technically correct, but he's on his way: he knows that grammar matters, even if he wields it as a blunt instrument. (He goes on to say that his need is "for an inspiring wife-life-partner". There he and I part company. Too many hyphens. Sorry.)

If you're still wondering why punctuation is important at all, I can only tell you the story from which the title of Truss's book is derived.

"A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. 'Why?' asks the confused waiter. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. 'I'm a panda,' he says. 'Look it up.' The waiter turns to the relevant entry. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'" Sometimes, as Truss observes, punctuation is a matter of life and death.

nilroy@lycos.com