Today's New York Times features an article about the runaway British bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss. I have not read this book, but I already think it is great for two reasons: I have a serious aversion to what Jasper Fforde calls "grocer's apostrophes," and the joke the title is based on is my all-time favorite joke. Here's how the NYT breaks it down:
The book is dedicated to "the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg," who, Ms. Truss writes, "in 1905 demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution." As for its title, it comes from a joke that begins, "A panda walks into a cafe."
The panda orders a sandwich, eats it and then fires a gun into the air. On his way out, he tosses a badly punctuated wildlife manual at the confused bartender and directs him to the entry marked "Panda."
Whereupon the bartender reads: "Panda. Large black-and-white bearlike mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
The version I always tell, however, involves a panda walking into a western-style saloon, throwing back a bowl of peanuts, shooting a gun into the air and walking back out. The bewildered bartender follows him out and asks him what the performance was all about. The panda replies "look me up in the dictionary." (To me, that's actually the funniest part of the joke.)
The bartender walks back into the bar and retrieves a dictionary where the entry for "Panda" reads "...eats shoots and leaves." Now, my version works fine without the punctuation angle because I tell it aloud. However, my version strains credibility not because it features a panda walking into a bar, but because there is really no reason for a bartender to keep a dictionary handy.
You can find more of the interesting word usements I structure on Apple.com.
Read my article, Better Writing Through Design, on No. 242 of A List Apart.