The title of the book is a syntactic ambiguity — a verbal fallacy arising from an ambiguous or erroneous grammatical construction — and derived from a joke (a variant on a "bar joke") about bad punctuation, here from the back cover of the book:
A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots, & leaves."
The joke turns on the ambiguity of the final sentence fragment. As intended by the author, "eats" is a verb, while "shoots" and "leaves" are the verb's objects: a panda's diet comprises shoots and leaves. However, the erroneous introduction of the comma gives the mistaken impression that the sentence fragment comprises three verbs listing in sequence the panda's characteristic conduct: it eats, then it shoots, and finally it leaves.
There are some good ones on that list. My all-time favorite (which can not possibly have been accidental), was Blackberry (RIM)'s job site: www.rim.jobs
I like how so many of these are for tech websites.
They’re also very 2000s. There’s something retro about websites, in that in the past decade Web 2.0 “platforms” have eaten these sites’ lunch. They still exist and are good at what they do, but are no longer the focus of the Web.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_&_Leaves
The title of the book is a syntactic ambiguity — a verbal fallacy arising from an ambiguous or erroneous grammatical construction — and derived from a joke (a variant on a "bar joke") about bad punctuation, here from the back cover of the book:
The joke turns on the ambiguity of the final sentence fragment. As intended by the author, "eats" is a verb, while "shoots" and "leaves" are the verb's objects: a panda's diet comprises shoots and leaves. However, the erroneous introduction of the comma gives the mistaken impression that the sentence fragment comprises three verbs listing in sequence the panda's characteristic conduct: it eats, then it shoots, and finally it leaves.See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_(punctuation)