bridget jones' two weeks notice

Eats, Shoots & Leaves is the now-infamous tirade against the punctuation-error pandemic brought on by the Internet.

Despite my early life as one of the grammatical anal-retentives for which this book is a call to arms, it took me three sittings to get through this slim tome. Face it: grammar just isn’t all that interesting to most native English speakers. And Truss’ reactionary stance is irrational in the face of her own evidence that punctuation has always been in a state of flux. She rails against the shortsightedness of American software companies, but ignores the present state of the Internet as a multilingual space (in which the second-most popular language in many forums is hypheneschewing German).

So why is the book such a phenomenal bestseller? I can’t speak for the Redcoats, but this American laughed aloud at Truss’ Bridget-Jones voice and obscure soccer references. She’s got a way with words.

British literature is the shining beacon in the twilight of British pop culture. American movies, music, and reality TV are unstoppable, co-opting every untalented Natalie Portman look-alike, and condemning them to a career in costume dramas. The Limeys launched counter-invasions of Fab Fours, Goth Punks, and Spice Girls, with each successive wave fading faster than the previous one. But the Tommies never met their match in literature. For every Hemingway, Dickinson, or Twain, they can throw back three Woolfs, Hardys, Austens, Tolkiens, Dickenses, and Shakespeares. Why is it that, generations after Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald, thousands of people are still trying to write the Great American Novel? Haven’t we managed one yet?

But in the realm of books people actually read (as opposed to watching the Gwyneth Paltrow re-enactment), the match is much closer: Dan Brown, Jared Diamond, and the writers at Comedy Central more than hold their own against J. K. Rowling, John Keegan, and Helen Fielding. The faintly naughty-but-nice witticisms of Bridget Jones and Eats, Shoots & Leaves strike me as amusingly provincial, like the dialects of Bob & Doug McKenzie or Keanu Reeves.

Americans have always, if unconsciously, thought of British English as more proper and dignified. But we’re thinking of the Queen’s English: Professor Higgins and Anthony Hopkins, not Eliza Doolittle and Bridget Jones. Since Pygmalion opened in 1917, the trend in British pop culture seems to favor the Doolittles.

Reading Truss’ account of the differences between British and American names for punctuation marks, I recalled how my uncle often used the term “full stop” when I was a child. I gathered from the use of the term in telegrams that this meant “period”. (How was I familiar with telegraph idiom? Must have been an old movie on the telly.) You see: he’d learned English in Singapore.

Then, in 1996, I was surprised to discover that Norwegians in Oslo spoke impeccable American English. (Thank God, since my familiarity with Norwegian was limited to a few Swedish Chef skits.) Surely, if there were a country that would choose British English, it would be their neighbors across the North Sea. Nope: when they struck oil in the 70’s, they quickly set their sights on economic parity with the United States. Now in 2005, when I hear the words “Bridget Jones”, I think of a teary-eyed girl from Katy, Texas.

So forget about the end of punctuation – is the sun finally setting on the empire of the British language?