Punctuation based "syntactic ambiguity :" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_&_Leaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_&_Leaves The title of

Punctuation based "syntactic ambiguity :" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_&_Leaves 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: 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. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_(punctuation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_(punctuation)