Eats, Shites and Leaves - A. Parody

Reads shite and blogs. What a load of crap! This is obviously a cheapo cash-in on the success of Lynne Truss's Eats Shoots and Leaves, and involved minimal effort on the part of the "author," who seems to have just cobbled together a selection of bad jokes about grammar and somehow persuaded someone to publish it. Most of the sections are recognisable from those vaguely amusing emails that do the rounds ("Rules of English - you mustn't never use no double negatives" etc), but some of the jokes are even worse - even the "man with a wooden leg called Smith" gag is dredged up.

Now, don't get me wrong - I like funny examples of English used badly. The operative word, however, is funny, and that's something noticeably missing from this book. The few smiles it generated came from the Colemanballs-style quotes from famous idiots, but those were so swamped by stale jokes, pointless lists of filler material (archaic words beginning with "where"?) and rants against some strawman concept of a grammarian that it's really not worth trying to fillet them out. If you remove all the crap this might make a nice pamphlet.

1/10