Eats, Shoots, and Leaves

In a time of ai-generated-slop everywhere you look, a humourous book on the nuances of grammer is just the tonic.

“Enjoy yourselves, but do it by being disciplined.”

Neil Warnock, at the time Sheffield United manager (in a changing room somewhere in the 2000’s)

I can’t think of a better way of articulating what it’s like to read this book than citing legendary manager of underdog football teams, Neil Warnock. This definitely falls into the same category as my previous book review (The Language of Cities) in that it sharpens your senses — but you find yourself having fun in the process.

At a point in time where generating content is effortless and lazy, pushing the cognitive load onto the reader, this book is the perfect antidote — it gets you back to appreciating the joys (and infuriating idiosyncrasies and contradictions) of the english language.

While this book isn’t really meant to make you a better writer or editor, surreptitiously, the rules and nuances start to sink in — while you learn the history of punctuation along the way.

Published in 2005, I received this book as a Christmas present from my parents in either 2007 or 2008, and I’ve kept it with me ever since. Reading it now, in 2026, you really feel the sense you’re reading something from the recent past, one where the IT-and-internet-ages were causing disruption: text messages meant doing away with superfluous characters and punctuation, and shopfronts and display boards were full of gramamtical errors that only those with a keen-eye would notice (and be annoyed by).

It feels almost twee, given where we are now.

For balance, this book is not about turning you into a copy-snob — and as someone who loves giving a colleague a “👉🗄️📁👀😍✨” set of emoji’s in response to great work, I am no better (points if you can figure it out).

I’m gonna wrap up by going full circle on the football-to-writing interplay: