Eats, shoots & leaves

Currently sitting at the MBM reading a particularly amusing book on English grammar by Lynne Truss, when the time should have been spent more productively working out the Rouse dynamics of a polymer melt....

Anyway, the basic premise of the books revolves around the misuse of punctuation in modern english usage, as illustrated by this short story of a panda:

A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

'Why?' asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

'Well, I'm a panda', he says, at the door. 'Look it up.'

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. 'Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.'

This had me thinking a bit about punctuation in the Bengali language. However, we bongs are a clever lot, or at least, we used to be until people started importing western punctuation into the Bengali script, a fairly modern trend. We make do with just the daanri (|), the equivalent of the full stop. The rest is all handled by the language itself. Pretty neat!