Retraction of irritable rant

Eats, Shoots and Leaves has won me over. First of all, I had to get over the author's peevishness (see freethepeeves.com for an admirable campaign against grammatical peevishness). Then I slowly realized that she wasn't offering a systematic philosophy of punctuation. Her main purpose was to entertain, and she was doing a magnificent job of it. "If there is one lesson to be learned from this book," she writes (p. 125), "it is that there is never a dull moment in the world of punctuation." What makes her readers love her - no matter what they think of the serial (Oxford) comma - is simply that she cares about these things, and she's very, very funny.