Originally created 04/15/04  Punctuation prognosis is grim but
funny in unlikely best seller  BRIGHTON, England -- Lynne Truss
fears the English language could be in its death throes.
Proper, written English, that is - the kind with correctly
placed apostrophes, elegantly positioned semicolons, commas in
all the right places and in none of the wrong ones. It's being
shoved aside, she thinks, by an electronic onslaught of
uncapitalized, unpunctuated, ill-thought-out Internet verbiage.
Truss, a longtime writer and editor, is sure that trying to halt
the decline would be hopeless, but she wants her new book,
"Eats, Shoots & Leaves" to at least serve as a warm and funny
eulogy to a little-heralded but crucial piece of the language:
punctuation.  Despite tackling a subject that's so dry that it's
put generations of schoolchildren to sleep, the book has won
critics' praise for its humor and readability and it's been a
surprise hit in Britain, selling more than half a million
copies. Truss also received the book o