'Eats, shoots and leaves' has been hailed a breath of fresh air for grammar pedants across the English-speaking world.
Daily Echo sub Lyndon Hogg met up with its author, Lynne Truss.

I must have been about 16 when I realised my mother was the biggest pedant in the world.

Every time a bald female Irish singer blubbed about comparisons, she used to turn red and wobble with rage.

"It's nothing compares WITH you! WITH you! What's wrong with you? I'll kill you!"

Well, perhaps Mum didn't actually say she wanted to kill Sinead O'Connor, but breaking a couple of limbs or twisting off her lips certainly wouldn't have been out of the question.

Now I didn't want to inherit her vice for such things but I have. And I may be altogether worse.

So it's quite a relief to speak to someone who shares my feelings for an unwaveringly steadfast approach to preserving the English language.

You might have heard of Lynne Truss and her new book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves. There's a good chance you may have received it as a Christmas gift.

Splattered throughout its 200-odd pages are examples of a culture slowly turning its back on those useful little marks designed to tell us how to read what comes naturally to the lips.

The latest international "mistake" was a risible film featuring Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock: Two Weeks Notice. To the average sub-editor, it's plainly obvious this should read Two Weeks' Notice. It's a possessive - the Notice belongs to the Two Weeks.

Now Hollywood bigwigs may have a reputation for being fairly stupid, but their proof-readers aren't. This would have been picked up, corrected and then discarded because Joe Cinemagoer doesn't properly understand apostrophes.

And this is a tragedy, Lynne says.

"It would be a shame to lose the apostrophe, it's a wonderful grammatical tool."

Wonderful it may be, but so was Piltdown Man in his day until he fell in a bog, and for all Lynne is trying her damnedest to raise awareness of the plight of punctuation, she admits the fight is probably in vain.

"In 100 or 200 years I don't think we'll be using the apostrophe much, if at all. There won't be a lot of it around.

"That's the way with language, it's ever-changing and it evolves, but it would still be a shame to lose it."

So how did we get in such a state? Our education has been fine, hasn't it? Well, no.

"The reason punctuation is in so much danger is because it wasn't taught for about 30 or 40 years in a lot of schools.

"So for a generation and a half, we had people growing up not knowing what to put where. Some of these people then became teachers, and if teachers weren't taught it, it doesn't bode well."

But there's hope in the guise of Eats, Shoots and Leaves. As we exchange stories of English ignorance in Bournemouth's Waterstone's, Lynne is barely given time to gesticulate as customers remove her work with alarming frequency.

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