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Lynne Truss may owe her career to proper English usage. She got her first job in journalism, she was told, when her competition confused “furbish” with “furnish” in his letter of application.

But it’s not just about words; it’s those little marks between them. The diminutive dots and banana like curves that usher a reader through a minefield of potential ambiguity, turning a sentence like, “A woman without her man is nothing,” into “A woman: without her, man is nothing.” And when punctuation is misapplied, or not there at all, Truss says the very foundation of the English language is debased. Her best-selling book on the subject has won her cheers from fellow punctuation protectors, and jeers from at least one who says open quote “oh do go and get a life Lynne Truss you flaming pedant.” Well. We’ll see what she has to say to that.

Guests:

Lynne Truss, author, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”