Best-selling stickler Lynne Truss saw a sign at the weekend that showed her the way forward. It said: 'Don't step on a moving gangplank when the ferry is rolling heavily under the effects of high sea waves.'
Asked at a Foreign Correspondents' Club lunch yesterday whether she had found any funny misuses of English in Hong Kong, the author and journalist said the language was shown more respect here than it received in most English-speaking countries.
'The one thing I noticed was a perfectly grammatical, wonderful sign on the Star Ferry,' she said. 'The person beside me couldn't believe I was so moved. But that's the kind of sad life I have.'
Her love of punctuation has seen two million copies of her book Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation printed since its release in November.
The sign affirmed one of the book's arguments - that people who learn English as a second language often have a better grasp of punctuation than native speakers.
'If you're learning a foreign language, you learn the parts of speech and you learn the grammar. You have to,' she said.