Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

Merely Conventional Signs

On page 33 of the first-edition copy of Eric Part-ridge’s You Have a Point There that I have before me as I write (I borrowed it from the University of London Library), there is a marginal note made by a reader long ago. A marginal note? Yes, and I have been back to check and muse on it several times. Partridge, who is just about to elucidate the 17th application of the comma (“Commas in Fully Developed Complex Sentences”), is explaining that in this particular case it is difficult to formulate a set of rigid rules. “My aim is to be helpful, not dogmatic,” he explains. “The following examples will, if examined and pondered, supply the data from which any person of average intelligence can, without strain, assimilate an unformulated set of working rules.” At which the unknown, long-ago reader has written in old-fashioned handwriting up the side, “Rot! You lazy swine Partridge.”

There are two reasons why I have borne this ball-point outburst in mind while writing this book. One is that if Eric Partridge wasn’t comprehensive enough for some people, there is obviously naff-all chance for me. But there is also the fact that this startling effusion has lain within the pages of You Have a Point There possibly for fifty years, which is as long as the book itself has been a book. And this makes me wistful. The future of books is a large subject and perhaps this is not a suitable place to pursue it. We hear every day that the book is dead and that even the dimmest child can find “anything” on the internet. Yet I’m afraid I have to stick my small oar in because – as I hope has become clear from the foregoing chapters – our system of punctuation was produced in the age of printing, by printers, and is reliant on the ascendancy of printing to survive. Our punctuation exists as a printed set of conventions; it has evolved slowly because of printing’s innate conservatism; and is effective only if readers have been trained to appreciate the nuances of the printed page. The good news for punctuation is that the age of printing has been glorious and has held sway for more than half a millennium. The bad news for punctuation, however, is that the age of printing is due to hold its official retirement party next Friday afternoon at half-past five.

“I blame all the emails and text messages,” people say, when you talk about the decline in punctuation standards. Well, yes. The effect on language of the electronic age is obvious to all, even though the process has only just begun, and its ultimate impact is as yet unimaginable.

“I write quite differently in emails,” people say, with a look of inspired and happy puzzlement – a look formerly associated only with starry-eyed returnees from alien abduction. “Yes, I write quite differently in emails, especially in the punctuation. I feel it’s OK to use dashes all the time, and exclamation marks. And those dot, dot, dot things!”

“Ellipsis,” I interject.

“I can’t seem to help it!” they continue. “It’s as if I’ve never heard of semicolons! Dot, dot, dot! And everyone’s doing the same!”

This is an exciting time for the written word: it is adapting to the ascendant medium, which happens to be the most immediate, universal and democratic written medium that has ever existed. But it is all happening too quickly for some people, and we have to face some uncomfortable facts: for example, it is already too late to campaign for Heinz to add punctuation marks to the Alphabetti Spaghetti, in the hope that all will be well.

Having grown up as readers of the printed word (and possibly even scribblers in margins), we may take for granted the processes involved in the traditional activity of reading – so let us remind ourselves. The printed word is presented to us in a linear way, with syntax supreme in conveying the sense of the words in their order. We read privately, mentally listening to the writer’s voice and translating the writer’s thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it. Picking up the book in the first place entails an active pursuit of understanding. Holding the book, we are aware of posterity and continuity. Knowing that the printed word is always edited, typeset and proof-read before it reaches us, we appreciate its literary authority. Having paid money for it (often), we have a sense of investment and a pride of ownership, not to mention a feeling of general virtue.

All these conditions for reading are overturned by the new technologies. Information is presented to us in a non-linear way, through an exponential series of lateral associations. The internet is a public “space” which you visit, and even inhabit; its product is inherently impersonal and disembodied. Scrolling documents is the opposite of reading: your eyes remain static, while the material flows past. Despite all the opportunities to “interact”, we read material from the internet (or CD-roms, or what-ever) entirely passively because all the interesting associative thinking has already been done on our behalf. Electronic media are intrinsically ephemeral, are open to perpetual revision, and work quite strenuously against any sort of historical perception. The opposite of edited, the material on the internet is unmediated, except by the technology itself. And having no price, it has questionable value. Finally, you can’t write comments in the margin of your screen to be discovered by another reader fifty years down the line.

Having said all this, there is no immediate cause for panic. If the book is dying, then at least it is treating its loyal fans (and the bookshops) to an extravagant and extended swan song. But when we look around us at the state of literacy – and in particular at all those signs for “BOBS’ MOTORS” and “ANTIQUE,S” – it just has to be borne in mind that books are no longer the main vehicles for language in modern society, and that if our fate is in the hands of the barbarians, there is an observable cultural drift that can only make matters worse. As I mentioned in this book’s introduction, by tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal under-educating in literacy has coincided with this un-expected explosion of global self-publishing. Thus people who don’t know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll. Mark Twain said it many years ago, but it has never been more true:

It hurts, though. It hurts like hell. Even in the knowledge that our punctuation has arrived at its present state by a series of accidents; even in the knowledge that there are at least seventeen rules for the comma, some of which are beyond explanation by top grammarians – it is a matter for despair to see punctuation chucked out as worthless by people who don’t know the difference between who’s and whose, and whose bloody automatic“grammar checker” can’t tell the difference either. And despair was the initial impetus for this book. I saw a sign for “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it, and something deep inside me snapped; snapped with that melancholy sound you hear in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, like a far-off cable breaking in a mine-shaft. I know that language moves on. It has to. Not once have I ever stopped to feel sorry for those Egyptian hieroglyph artists tossed on the scrapheap during a former linguistic transition (“Birds’ heads in profile, mate? You having a laugh?”). But I can’t help feeling that our punctuation system, which has served the written word with grace and ingenuity for centuries, must not be allowed to disappear without a fight.

Nothing as scary as this has confronted punctuation before. True, Gertrude Stein banged on a bit. But attacks on punctuation have always been feeble. The Futurists of the early 20th century had a go, but without much lasting effect. In 1913, F. T. Marinetti wrote a manifesto he called Destruction of Syntax/ Imagination without Strings/Words-in-Freedom which demanded the moral right of words to live un-fettered – and only slightly undermined its case by requiring such a lot of punctuation in the title.

Marinetti wanted to explode the “so-called typo-graphical harmony of the page” and he was influential both on poetry and on graphic design. Reading him now, however, one’s main impression is of a rather weedy visionary who fell asleep one night, saw in a dream how to use QuarkXPress, and was then cruelly deposited back again in the days before the First World War.

So much for Marinetti, then. Meanwhile, George Bernard Shaw, along with his famous doomed campaign to reform the spelling of the English language, had already started making efforts to undermine the contractive apostrophe. And while he certainly had more global influence than Marinetti did, he remained a one-man campaign. It is a measure of Shaw’s considerable monomania, by the way, that in 1945 he wrote to The Times on the issue of the recently deployed atomic bomb to point out that since the second “b” in the word bomb was needless (I’m not joking), enormous numbers of working hours were being lost to the world through the practice of conforming to traditional spelling.

Yes, GBS can be a pretty stark reminder of how far one may lose one’s sense of proportion when obsessed by matters of language.

But on the other hand he still writes better about language than most people, and in The Author in April 1902 he set out his “Notes on the Clarendon Press Rules for Compositors and Readers”, which included not only a brilliant attack on those “uncouth bacilli” (apostrophes) which appear so unnecessarily in words such as “dont” and “shant”, but was rather wonderful on italics too, and is perhaps where The Guardian got its ideas from:

Note the way Shaw (or his editor) puts the full stop inside the inverted commas in example two, by the way. While individual obsessives seem to have made little impact on the development of punctuation in the 20th century (Shaw had few followers, and nobody remembers the Futurists), it is quite clear that punctuation did develop quite robustly under other kinds of cultural pressure. Hyphenation practice has changed hugely in the past hundred years; also capitalisation, and the presentation of all forms of address. Nowadays we write:

Andrew Franklin

Profile Books

58A Hatton Garden

London EC1N 8LX

Or, let’s face it, I write that because he’s my publisher. But my point is: there is no punctuation in this at all, whereas just twenty years ago I would have written:

Mr. A. Franklin, Esq.,

Profile Books, Ltd.,

58A, Hatton Garden,

London, E.C.1

Those of us who were taught to place full stops after abbreviations have simply adapted to a world in which they are not required. I don’t write pub. or ’bus, but I’m quite sure I used to. When I trained as a journalist twenty-five years ago, the intermediate rule on matters of address was that if the contraction of a title still ended with the original final letter – thus “Mr” for “Mister”, or “Fr” for “Father” – no full stop was required, whereas if the title was cut short – “Prof” for “Professor” or “M” for “Monsieur” – a full stop was essential. I doubt anyone bothers with that distinction any more. It is worth pointing out, though, that American usage has retained a lot of the formal niceties that we have dropped. They also often use a colon after “Dear Andrew”, while on this side of the Atlantic we dither about whether even a comma looks a bit fussy.

There are other large changes to punctuation practice in our own lifetimes that have not troubled us much. Nobody says, “You can find it at BBC full stop Co full stop UK,” do they? Even the most hide-bound of us don’t mind this word “dot” getting into the language. Above all, though, a revolution in typographical spacing occurred so quietly that very few people noticed. Spaces were closed up; other spaces were opened; nobody campaigned. Dashes which were once of differing lengths for different occasions are now generally shorter, of uniform length, and sit between spaces. Until very recently, typists were taught to leave a two- or even three-space gap after a full stop, but now word-processing programs will automatically reduce the gap to a single word space. Semicolons and colons used to have a word space preceding them, and two spaces after, and to be honest, it looked very elegant : but nobody does that any more.

My point is that while massive change from the printed word to the bloody electronic signal is inevitably upon us, we diehard punctuation-lovers are perhaps not as rigid as we think we are. And we must guard against over-reacting. Those who identify “Netspeak” with Nineteen Eighty-Four’s “Newspeak” (on the basis that non-case-sensitive compound words such as “thoughtcrime” and “doubleplusgood” bear a superficial resemblance to “chatroom” and “newsgroup”) should urgently reconsider this association, not least because the key virtues of the internet are that it is not controlled by anyone, cannot be used as an instrument of oppression and is endlessly inclusive: its embracing of multitudes even extends to chatrooms in which, believe it or not, are discussed matters of punctuation. A site called “halfbakery”, for example, encourages correspondents with attractive names such as “gizmo” and “cheeselikesubstance” to swap ideas about punctuation reform. This is where the intriguing idea of using a tilde to sort out tricky plurals such as “bananas” came from. In one rather thrilling exchange in 2001, moreover, a member of the halfbakery crowd proposed the use of the upside-down question mark (¿) as a marker for a rhetorical question. This suggestion hung there like a bat in a cave for eighteen months until, astonishingly, someone called “Drifting Snowflake” wrote in to explain that a rhetorical question mark (the reversed one) existed already, “invented in the 16th century, though only in use for about 30 years”. Gosh. I wonder if Drifting Snowflake is male and unmarried? As the internet is dedicated to proving, you really have no idea who anybody is out there.

What to call the language generated by this new form of communication? Netspeak? Weblish? What-ever you call it, linguists are generally excited by it. Naomi Baron has called Netspeak an “emerging language centaur – part speech, part writing” and David Crystal says computer-mediated language is a genuine “third medium”. But I don’t know. Remember that thing Truman Capote said years ago about Jack Kerouac: “That’s not writing, it’s typing”? I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn’t writing, and doesn’t even qualify as typing either: it’s just sending. What did you do today? Sent a lot of stuff. “Don’t forget to send, dear.” Receiving, sending and arithmetic – we can say goodbye to the three R’s, clearly. Where valuable office hours used to be lost to people schmoozing at the water cooler, they are now sacrificed to people publishing second-hand jokes to every person in their email address book. We send pictures, videos, web addresses, homilies, petitions and (of course) hoax virus alerts, which we later have to apologise for. The medium and the message have never been so strongly identified. As for our writing personally to each other, how often do you hear people complain that emails subtract the tone of voice; that it’s hard to tell if someone is joking or not? Clicking on “send” has its limitations as a system of subtle communication. Which is why, of course, people use so many dashes and italics and capitals (“I AM joking!”) to compensate. That’s why they came up with the emoticon, too – the emoticon being the greatest (or most desperate, depending how you look at it) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne.

You will know all about emoticons. Emoticons are the proper name for smileys. And a smiley is, famously, this:

Forget the idea of selecting the right words in the right order and channelling the reader’s attention by means of artful pointing. Just add the right emoticon to your email and everyone will know what self-expressive effect you thought you kind-of had in mind. Anyone interested in punctuation has a dual reason to feel aggrieved about smileys, because not only are they a paltry substitute for expressing oneself properly; they are also designed by people who evidently thought the punctuation marks on the standard keyboard cried out for an ornamental function. What’s this dot-on-top-of-a-dot thing for? What earthly good is it? Well, if you look at it side-ways, it could be a pair of eyes. What’s this curvy thing for? It’s a mouth, look! Hey, I think we’re on to something.

Now it’s sad!

It looks like it’s winking!

It looks like it’s sticking its tongue out! The permutations may be endless:

Well, that’s enough. I’ve just spotted a third reason to loathe emoticons, which is that when they pass from fashion (and I do hope they already have), future generations will associate punctuation marks with an outmoded and rather primitive graphic pastime and despise them all the more. “Why do they still have all these keys with things like dots and spots and eyes and mouths and things?” they will grumble. “Nobody does smileys any more.”

Where does this leave people who love the comma and apostrophe? Where can we turn for consolation? Well, it is useful to remember how depressing the forecasts for language used to be, before the internet came along. Thirty years ago we assumed that television was the ultimate enemy of literacy and that, under the onslaught from image and sound, the written word would rapidly die out. Such fears, at least, have been dissipated. With text messaging and emailing becoming such compulsive universal activities, reading and writing are now more a fact of everyday life than they have ever been. The text message may be a vehicle for some worrying verbal shorthand (“CU B4 8?”), yet every time a mobile goes “Beep-beep; beep-beep” annoyingly within earshot on the bus, we should be grateful for a technological miracle that stepped in unexpectedly to save us from a predicted future that couldn’t read at all. As David Crystal writes in his book Language and the Internet (2001), the internet encourages aplayful and creative (and continuing) relationship with the written word. “The human linguistic faculty seems to be in good shape,” he concludes. “The arrival of Netspeak is showing us homo loquens at its best.”

Punctuation as we know it, however, is surely in for a rocky time. Before the advent of the internet, our punctuation system was very conservative about admitting new marks; indeed, it held out for decades while a newfangled and rather daft symbol called the “interrobang” (invented in 1962) tried to infiltrate the system, disguised as a question mark on top of an exclamation. The idea was that, when you said, “Where did you get that hat?!” you needed an interrobang to underline the full expression, and it is delightful to note that absolutely nobody was interested in giving it house-room. But I’m sure they will now, once they find out. Anything new is welcome today. People experiment with asterisks to show emphasis (“What a *day* I’ve had!”) and also angle brackets (“So have < I > !”). Yes, the interrobang will find its place at last – especially given that its name has overtones of a police interview terminating in an explosion. Violent path-lab terminology is very much in vogue in the modern world of punctuation. Remember when we used to call the solidus (/) a “stroke”?

Is it an option to cling on to the punctuation and grammar we know and love? Hope occasionally flares up and dies down again. In May 1999, Bob Hirschfield wrote a news story in The Washington Post about a computer virus “far more insidious than the recent Chernobyl menace” that was spreading throughout the internet. What did this virus do? Named the Strunkenwhite Virus (after The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White, a classic American style guide), it refused to deliver emails containing grammatical mistakes. Could it be true? Was the world to be saved at a stroke (or even, if we must, at a forward slash)? Sadly, no. The story was a wind-up. Hirschfield’s intention in inventing the Strunkenwhite Virus for the delight of his readers was simply to satirise the public’s appetite for wildly improbable virus scare stories. In the process, however, he painted such a heavenly vision of future grammatical happiness that he inadvertently broke the hearts of sticklers everywhere:

Hirschfield’s story ended with the saddest invention of all:

Given all that we know about the huge changes operating on our language at the moment – and given all that we know about the shortcomings of the punctuation system produced by the age of printing – should we be bothering to fight for the 17 uses of the comma, or the appositive colon? Isn’t it the case, in the end, that punctuation is just a set of conventions, and that conventions have no intrinsic worth? One can’t help remembering the moment in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark when the Bellman exhibits his blank map and asks the crew how they feel about it:

But after journeying through the world of punctuation, and seeing what it can do, I am all the more convinced we should fight like tigers to pre-serve our punctuation, and we should start now. Who wants a blank map, for heaven’s sake? There is more at stake than the way people read and write. Note the way the Washington Post news story explained the benefits of emailing: it “increased employees’ productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less time to formulate their thoughts”. If wevalue the way we have been trained to think by centuries of absorbing the culture of the printed word, we must not allow the language to return to the chaotic scriptio continua swamp from which it so bravely crawled less than two thousand years ago. We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and allusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.

One of the best descriptions of punctuation comes in a book entitled The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist (1989) by Thomas McCormack. He says the purpose of punctuation is “to tango the reader into the pauses, inflections, continuities and connections that the spoken line would convey”:

And here’s a funny thing. If all these high moral arguments have had no effect, just remember that ignorance of punctuation can have rather large practical repercussions in the real world. In February 2003 a Cambridge politics lecturer named Glen Rangwala received a copy of the British government’s most recent dossier on Iraq. He quickly recognised in it the wholesale copying of a twelve-year-old thesis by American doctoral student Ibrahim al-Marashi, “reproduced word for word, misplaced comma for misplaced comma”. Oh yes. Rangwala noticed there were some changes to the original, such as the word “terrorists” substituted for “opposition groups”, but otherwise much of it was identical. In publishing his findings, he wrote:

So we ignore the rules of punctuation at our political peril as well as to our moral detriment. When Sir Roger Casement was “hanged on a comma” all those years ago, who would have thought a British government would be rumbled on a comma (and a “yob’s comma”, at that) ninety years further down the line? Doesn’t it feel good to know this, though? It does. It really does.

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