A Book at (Sick)bed-time

:-) Eats, Shoots & Leaves
This little book about punctuation has been around for a few years, but somehow I'd never gotten around to buying it until this week, when I found it in the airport bookshop in Abu Dhabi.

The author, Lynne Truss, is a self-confessed "stickler" for punctuation, and she proceeds to give a potted history of each punctuation mark, along with rules for its proper usage. It's not as dull as I'm making it sound, particularly if you -- like me -- are a bit of a stickler yourself who cringes at the increasingly garish uses of the Greengrocer's Apostrophe (e.g. Apple's, Banana's & Pear's).

I fancy myself as a reasonable grammarian and punctuationist (is there such a word?), but I learned a lot of new things from this book, as well as receiving a welcome refresher course from what I learned at school, back in the days when kids were taught grammar and punctuation.

I have great respect for anyone who can take such a dry subject and make an entertaining little read out of it. If you haven't got this book and you care about punctuation, you know what to do...

:-( Still Ill
Cough, wheeze, sniff, sneeze.

You're lucky I can manage even these few words!