Eats shoots and leaves (France)

Colette said, when she told me her mother Jeanette’s cousin Francis and wife Nicole had invited us (Serge, Jeanette and I) over to theirs for dinner, that they were very nice people but loud.  In the end, for some reason, they came over to the farm house instead, and I cooked a Chinese meal.  The following day, Colette texted to find out how dinner at the cousin’s house had gone.  In my hurry, I left out a comma in my text back: “Dinner was here and loud dog died.”  

One of the dogs, Mizou, had been bitten in the leg (by a fox??) and been unwell, so she was allowed to spend all her time in the house, given all the juicy scraps, and fed special dishes (mashed potatoes in milk).  In my second and third weeks there, she’d had a couple of fits (like epileptic fits), requiring trips to the vet’s, and died in my final week there.  

Colette was trying to figure out which loud dog it might’ve been that died.  Dino immediately came to mind, being the perpetual woofer (not wwoofer — see The lone barking wwoofer), but he’d been in rude health (naturally, being a rude dog with a dirty habit — see Dino the dirty dog) when she was at the farm the weekend before.  Of course, my text should’ve been, “Dinner was here and loud, dog died.”

(France, September/October 2011)

*For those who don’t know the implications behind my choice of the title “Eats shoots and leaves”: 

(1) The dictionary definition of a panda, among other things, says it “eats shoots and leaves”; 

(2) Inserting a comma after “eats” makes “shoots” and “leaves” verbs instead of nouns, thereby changing the whole perspective altogether.  A comic strip has a panda walking into a bar restaurant, (ordering and) consuming some food, then pulling out a gun, firing into the air and walking out, hence “eats, shoots and leaves”.  

Lynn Truss has written a book about punctuation, with this title, and I think the comic strip might’ve been done just for the book.  Google her if you’re interested in more information about her.