Punctuation and the Colon

All,

taiwandave, I stand corrected. You are right, for I am sure I do use "it's" to represent "it has".

MM thank you for confirming that a complete phrase is required to the left of the colon. I wonder if there is some British English versus American English at play? Because this quote is taken from a book on punctuation, I would tend to think that editing process would be impecabble. Having written that, I do note that there are a lot of poor ratings on Amazon.com.

The quote is from page 43 of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" by Lynne Truss. It is the best-seller's list, which is quite amazing for a punctuation or grammar book.

MountainHiker

and for "it has"