Lynne Truss

We run in circles where people can get into rather heated discussions about prepositions and commas and such. Luckily, we also understand that these topics don’t exactly rock the coolness meter for most. That’s why Lynne Truss’s sassy grammar manual, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, caught our attention. It was fun! It was a million-plus seller! And not just copy editors were buying it! Apparently, Truss had so much fun fixing people’s language that she was moved to take on an even more ambitious project: improving their behavior. Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door finds Truss in a state of hilarious outrage over cell phones, litterbugs, and the countless forms of inconsiderateness that are acceptable in what passes for civil society these days.

Did you encounter a certain boor or witness a specific incident that inspired you to write your new book?
No, I’ve just been getting more sensitized in the past couple of years. I started noticing that people were behaving in public as if they were at home. I also started to feel nervous about speaking to strangers. And then I started to get very heated indeed about the way businesses are dumping all the work on their customers. My second reason for staying home and bolting the door (“Why am I the one doing this?”) is probably my most heartfelt.

What do you Brits think of Americans’ manners?
I think most Brits are impressed by the courtesy they encounter in America. However, there is a stereotype of selfish Americans abroad, who expect to be served first, and so on. A loud voice is interpreted as rude in Britain, so many American tourists are regarded as rude purely on account of their volume.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves inspired people to take an interest in grammar. Do you think Talk to the Hand will improve their manners?
It doesn’t have quite the same campaigning aims as Eats, Shoots & Leaves. I’m more interested in digging into the subject of rudeness, just to see where the trouble spots are. At the basis of the subject is simple morality, but there are layers of conditioning that are causing a lot of unnecessary trouble between people who have been brought up differently.

What do you think would change things? Is there no going back?
There is never any going back. In any case, people have been feeling similar “It’s all going to rack and ruin” despair since the beginning of time. Evidently, Socrates complained about disrespect in the young two and a half thousand years ago.

You explain the joke behind the title of Eats, Shoots & Leaves in that book. Do you know the origin of the expression “talk to the hand”?
The first knowledge I have of it is from the Jerry Springer Show.

As rude as it is, there’s a certain nerviness to the expression that makes it almost fun to be a jerk. Do you think that’s contributing to general ill behavior–people are just having fun?
Nearly all of British comedy at the moment is based on people being shockingly rude to each other. It is funny, and it’s probably always been funny. We used to have other strains as well–such as wit–but now it’s predominantly about people being cut down to size. Advertising aimed at younger people is always based on selfishness. Like, a woman will tell her husband that she can hear a noise outside. When he goes out, she shuts the door, runs upstairs, and luxuriates in the freshly laundered sheets, which are too good to share. Lots of things are too good to share. I find all that quite nasty.

Do you take cell phone calls in public?
Yes, and, like everybody, I instantly forget my surroundings. When I finish the call, I wonder briefly, “Did other people hear that?” and then I decide they probably didn’t.