An interesting book you may wish to read is “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”. The title comes from an article about pandas. The way the sentence in the article was written, it stated that pandas do three things for dinner.

1. Eats [has dinner],

2. Shoots [fires a gun],

3. Leaves [gets out of there].

The author of the book thought that it would make an interesting title for his book on proper punctuation.

The way the sentence should have been written is “eats shoots and leaves”. Notice that the comma after ‘Eats’ has been removed. This sentence means that the panda consumes bamboo ‘shoots and leaves’ [parts of the bamboo plant] for dinner.

It is the punctuation [part of syntax] that gives the sentence its proper meaning.