A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
    “Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
    “I’m a panda,” he says at the door. “Look it up.”

    The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation. “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” Or maybe it’s “Eats shoots and leaves.”
                                                                      ———
    The above, taken from the blurb of a best-seller, “Eats Shoots and Leaves,” by Lynne Truss, is all about punctuation, the traffic signs to language.
    Punctuation does really matter. The most common questions Optic staffers ask deal with punctuation and grammar: How can I tell the difference between “lie” and “lay”? What’s the difference between “its” and “it’s”? What about “there,” “their” and “they’re”?
    This is an attempt to unconfuse some of the most common problems in the English language.
    For me, high anxiety came easy at Immaculate Conception School as Sister Mary Medulla Oblongata parsed sentences with us. I tried not to take her chiding parsonally, incorrectly answering “gerund” every time the teacher asked me to identify a participle. The fact that both terms end in “ing” made the distinction difficult, and that was precisely why we got drilled on them. It’s akin to the difference between a walking stick and a walking stick.
    When I became a teacher, I was amazed at how most of the mechanical errors people commit are few. It’s a matter of these few being repeated constantly.
    The there/their/they’re troika remains a villain. I tell my students that “heir” and “their” have much in common, as do “there” and “here.” And there’s no logical way to tell when to use “lie” and “lay.” I try to explain that when we use “lay,” we need something to lay, or lay down, like tile, eggs or the law. “Lie” is what we do in bed. And yet, if you reclined in bed last night, you lay (but not layed or laid) there.
    After appearing to have grasped the distinction, a co-worker said, “I’ll go over it again tonight while I’m laying in bed.”
    “Eats Shoots and Leaves” mentions a shopkeeper in Bristol who would deliberately stick ungrammatical signs on his window as a ruse to draw customers in. When they went into the store to complain, he would talk them into buying something.
    Ahh, so that’s the rationale! The many signs in Las Vegas that bear bad punctuation, grammar and spelling are placed there deliberately. People just ignore proper English.
    Here’s an example: Apparently someone left a shower running at the Rec Center. A sign the next day read, “Please turn off the water when your done.” People like me unfailingly ask the person in charge, “Why didn’t you spell it ‘you’re’ (as in you are)?” Is it possible the misspelling was done on purpose, to get people to say, “Well, as long as I’m here, I think I’ll take a dip. Here’s my money”?
    A panel truck in town used to carry a painted message, “Smile if your nuts.” Obviously, the author of that sign was unable to hear the difference between “you’re,” and “your,” which denotes possession. I hear “ewer” for the former; perhaps others don’t.
    In freshman composition at Luna Community College, I asked my class to punctuate two expressions: “Guess what she’s doing” and “I wonder where my dog is.”All but one student tacked a question mark to the end of the sentences. I wonder why?
    Well, each sentence suggests uncertainty: We don’t know what she’s doing, and a question is implied in our zeal to find out. “I wonder” also implies uncertainty. Yet both of these sentences ought to end with a period. Period.
    And certain common prepositional phrases often get punctuated the same way, regardless of how they function in a sentence. It’s proper to say, “The ball went out of bounds (no hyphens; it’s simply giving the direction of the ball),” because there’s no reason to include hyphens, whose function is to make the three words act as one. However, “He threw an out-of-bounds ball” requires hyphens, as all of the words in that unit function as one word, in the same way we would say, “He threw an orange ball.” And the gang is over the hill, but it’s an over-the-hill gang.
    This crash course won’t be complete without reference to people’s penchant for using quotation marks for emphasis. Restaurants sometimes describe their burritos as “delicious.” They may well be, but sprinkling quotation marks around single words usually denotes irony, as if the burritos really tasted like like the bottom of an ashtray.
    Quotation marks ideally surround quoted words. And yet, political candidates sprinkle quotes around words like “honest,” “reliable,” “truthful” and “experienced.” Without such gratuitous quote marks, we’d never have occasion to question politicians’ fitness for the job.
    Surely they’re overused because quotations tend to make words stand out. But they ought not be used for emphasis. That’s what exclamation marks, boldface, capitals and italics are for. In moderation.
    When was the last time you got a memo marked URGENT!!!!!! with a host of extra marks of punctuation, like this?????? Do several marks of punctuation really suffice other than to raise a grammarian’s blood pressure?
    So, punctuate with care, and never fail, to put commas, in the right places.