“Linguistic study no longer lays down rules for correct grammar, but studies the rules that are actually adhered to by particular cultural groups. The aim is not to give laws for human utterance, but to understand the utterances that actually occur.”
—Graham Hough
Lynne Truss has based the title of her popular book Eats, Shoots & Leaves on a joke about poor punctuation1:
A panda enters a café, eats a sandwich, and starts shooting at the people in the café. When an amazed waiter blurts out a ‘Why?’ in the ensuing confusion, the panda throws a copy of a wildlife manual at him. And sure enough, he finds the following description against the word ‘Panda’ in the manual: ‘Panda: Large black-and-white ...