In the book* Eats Shoots and Leaves,* the author has a nice little passage. A letter from Mary to John, punctuated one way it reads as a love letter, the other way as plea for him to leave her alone.
I presume it is not under copyright and would like to use it for a class. Anyone out there have it?
Google Books has it.
Maybe you’re referring to this page of the book where there is indeed an example of a letter which can alter its sense depending on punctuation?
I get a message in German which tells me that I can’t read that page (for a choice of one out of two reasons).
(And since the book was published in 2004 and the author Lynne Truss is still alive, of course it’s still in copyright).
Ah, OK. I get the page as I intended it, but then again I’m using a German version of Firefox.
If you search for the book in Google Books, you ought to find it in English. The letter Paul is referring to is on page 9, but I’m not going to type the text of the letter here (actually it’s just eight lines) for copyright reasons.
The letter itself is pretty sophisticated. You can indeed reverse the meaning of it by changing or moving the punctuation marks.
The book describes it as a “popular ‘Dear Jack’ letter” so it does not appear to be the author’s original work. Strictly speaking that doesn’t mean it’s not copyrighted, but if it’s never been published and has been widely distributed without attribution then authorship may be impossible to prove. Regardless, I don’t mind including a book excerpt here under Fair Use.
Thank you all.