Pandas and Punctuation
Published by Yazad Jal November 19th, 2004 in StimulantsI’m currently reading Lynne Truss’s excellent Eats, Shoots & Leaves. After searching high and low for a paperback copy (I generally don’t like lugging hardcovers), I finally found one at Book Zone on Dadabhai Naoroji Road. I also discovered that Book Zone is run by the same friends who run the excellent Sterling Book House — my old source of college textbooks.
The book has quite a few good jokes on punctuation along with the good humoured set of rules — Truss maintains that the book is a “zero tolerance guide.” The joke explaining the title is below.
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.”
Yazad,
Bookshops in Singapore are selling it alongside another book which has a similar cover, but claims to be a zero tolerance guide to bad English…