Eats, fish & leaves

There is a classic joke that depends upon the sloppy employment of a comma: Eats, shoots and leaves. This is how Wikipedia tells it:

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.

I was reminded of the joke this morning as I watched an eagle eat, fish and leave — er, eat fish and leave. The smaller male Bald Eagle is eating (and not sharing) a fish in the company of his larger (presumed) mate.

The eagle…

eats fish

and leaves.