What's the biggest and most inspiring British export since the latest volume of "Harry Potter"? Not embattled football star David Beckham. Not a young prince, dutifully inspecting misery in the Third World. Not even another eloquent apologia for the fiasco in Iraq by Prime Minister Tony Blair. No, the latest manifestation of Cool Britannia is a slight, breezy, yet erudite book on English punctuation.
Lynne Truss, the author of "Eats, Shoots and Leaves," is a feisty Englishwoman who is so affronted by the rampant misuse of apostrophes, commas, semicolons, dashes and other forms of punctuation in English that she believes offenders "deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave." She wrote this book less to instruct (there are other, more complete usage guides, she admits, "read principally by keen foreigners") than to comfort native English-speakers who share her outrage on this single, narrow language issue and to issue a call to arms.
The subtitle is "A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation," but "Punctuation Sticklers, Unite!" would have worked just as well. It turns out that there are a lot more sticklers than she expected, and they include foreigners.