was she trying for irony?

[cellio]

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation sounds like a great book for grammar nerds, but I am put off somewhat by the 1.5 punctuation errors in the title. (One is debatable and might be excused by context (it refers to a joke containing the phrase); the other is clearly wrong.)

Comments

[rani23.livejournal.com]

Another thing to consider is that the author doesn't usually have control over what the front of the book looks like -- that's often up to the publisher.

[cellio]

True. I guess I had hoped that in the case of a grammar book they'd be more careful about doing what the author specifies. :-)

[sui66iy.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, if you type "zero tolerance" into Amazon's search box, only one of the top ten titles presented contains a hyphen. (Adding the hyphen to the search expression does not change this.)

This is consistent with the Wikipedia's claim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen) that most advertising and labeling eschews use of the hyphen in favor of visual cleanliness.

(The comma thing was obviously intentional. The whole point is to attract the attention of grammar sticklers such as yourself.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/tim_/]

In, I think, the T_EXbook, or possibly the L^AT_EX book, or some such similar book on computerized typesetting published by Addison-Wesley, on the very first page after the cover appeared the usual list of the publisher's cities, including "Signapore". You'd think that would be boilerplate that would just be copied and pasted into every book they did, but I guess not. This was less than 10 years ago, too, so it's not like the use of computers in publishing was a new thing. Not quite the same thing as here, but close.