This month’s Readers’ Digest screwed up the punchline of the panda joke* by leaving out the all-important comma. I guess they’re coppy editor was to zealous.
A panda walks into a restaurant and orders a meal. When finished, he whips out a gun, fires it into the air and departs. The owner follows him outside and says, “What the hell was that all about?” The panda hand him a zoo pamphlet and replies, “I’m a panda. Look it up.” The man reads the pamphlet, which says "Panda: A large relative of the raccoon. Eats*, **shoots and leaves."
No, there shouldn’t be a comma there. The joke is on the panda’s bad grammar: the pamphlet describes what a panda eats; the panda interprets it as a list of things a panda does, despite the lack of commas.
My usage pet peeve is “loose” for “lose”. I think I actually see the misusage more frequently than the correct usage these days.
What bugs me the most in that magazine, though, is the tag line for Mary Roach’s column. It’s something like “Mary finds humour in the oddest places – and her car keys.” Drives me just a little bit nuts every time I see it.
Sorry, but you’re wrong: the joke is that the pamphlet is incorrect. The Amazon page for the book Eats, Shoots & Leaves even says so:
You would probably like the one that was posted on the side of the Winn Dixie in the town (college town, no less) I used to live in:
Skateboarding “strickly” prohibited!
One thing I’ve never understood about the apostrophed plurals is…how does the writer decide what to apostrophize? I’ve never actually seen a piece of writing in which all the plurals had apostrophes, so what is the rule inside their head?
Until I read this I’d completely forgotten: before she died, my grandmother had started signing birthday and Christmas cards as “Grandma.” I would laugh to myself while wondering if there was something she was trying to tell me…
