A panda walks into a café and orders a sandwich. He eats it, then draws a gun and shoots the other patrons.

A surviving waiter, quivering as he looks up from the carnage, asks, “Why?”

Before walking out the door, the panda tosses the waiter a poorly punctuated wildlife manual and replies, “Look it up.”

The waiter searches for the relevant entry and reads aloud: “Panda. Large, black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.”

This joke serves as the namesake for Lynne Truss’s best-selling book, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.”

It also reminds us how easily our language may be mangled – or manipulated – so that two people using the same words can intend totally different meanings.

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