The Size of Thoughts

by Nicholson Baker

  The upright letter C, for capitulum, developed into the popular medieval paragraph symbol, ¶, called at times a pilcrow or a paraph. Seventh-century Irish scribes were in the habit of using more points when they wanted a longer pause; thus a sentence might end with a colon and a comma (:,), or two periods and a comma (..,), or three commas together (,,,). At the close of the twelfth century, one of the dictaminists, a man named Buoncompagno, troubled by so much irreconcilable complexity, proposed a pared-down slash-and-dash method: a dash would mark all final pauses, and a slash would mark all lesser pauses. It didn’t take, although the “double virgula” (//) was used to separate sentences in the fifteenth century, and Edmund Spenser and Walter Ralegh sometimes hand-wrote with single slashes, rather than commas. A plus sign (+) stood for a period in a few early printed books; in others, it could set off a quotation.

  Printing eventually slowed the pace of makeshift invention, forcing out many quaint superfluities, but novel marks, and surprising adaptations of old marks, may appear at any time. Besides smileys, online services have lately given rise to the ecstatic bracket hug of greeting: {{{{{{{{Shana!!!}}}}}}}}. Legal punctuation continues to thrive—the ™, the ®, and the © are everywhere. (The title of Jurassic Park is not Jurassic Park, but Jurassic Park™ likewise David Feldman’s Why Do Clocks Run Clockwise and Other Imponderables™.)

  Especially fashionable now is the sm, as in “Forget Something?sm”—observed not long ago on a plastic notice beside the bathroom sink in a room at a Holiday Inn: a mark that modifies the phrase it follows to mean, “This is not merely a polite question regarding whether you have successfully packed everything you require during your stay, this utterance is part of our current chain-wide marketing campaign, and we are so serious about asking it of you that we hereby offer fair warning that if you or anyone else attempts to extend such a courtesy to another guest anywhere in the hotel industry in printed or published form, either on flyers, placards, signs, pins, or pieces of folded plastic positioned at or beside a sink, vanity, or other bathroom fixture, we, the owner of this service mark, will torment and tease you with legal remedies.” Even the good old comma continues to evolve: it was flipped upside down and turned into the quotation mark circa 1714, and a woman I knew in college punctuated her letters to her high school friends with homemade comma-shapes made out of photographs of side-flopping male genitals that she had cut out of Playgirl.

  Until now, readers have had to fulfill their need for the historical particulars of this engrossingly prosaic subject with narrow-gauge works of erudition such as E. Otha Wingo’s sober Latin Punctuation in the Classical Age, or John Lennard’s extraordinary recent monograph on the history of the parenthesis, But I Digress (1991)—a jewel of Oxford University Press scholarship, by the way, gracefully written and full of intelligence, decked out with a complete scholarly apparatus of multiple indices, bibliographies, and notes, whose author, to judge by the startling jacket photo (shaved head with up-sticking central proto-Mohawk tuft, earring on left ear, wilted corduroy jacket, and over-laundered T-shirt bearing some enigmatic insignia underneath), put himself through graduate school by working as a ticket scalper at Elvis Costello concerts. (A discussion of Elvis Costello’s use of the parenthesis in “Let Him Dangle” figures in a late chapter.)

  At last, however, we have Pause and Effect, Dr. Malcolm Parkes’s brave overview: “an introduction,” so he unassumingly subtitles it, though it is much more than introductory, “to the history of punctuation in the West.” Not in the East, mind, or elsewhere—Arabic, Greek, and Sanskrit customs await a final fuse-blowing collation. (And according to the MLA index, there is Nanette Twine’s 1984 article on “The Adoption of Punctuation in Japanese Script,” in Visible Language, a journal that has recently done exciting things for the study of the punctuational past, to be absorbed; and, for canon-stretchers, John Duitsman’s “Punctuation in Thirteen West African Languages” and Carol F. Justus’s “Visible Sentences in Cuneiform Hittite.”) Though his punning title promises sprightliness, Dr. Parkes—fellow of Keble College and lecturer in paleography at the University of Oxford—has produced a rich, complex, and decidedly unsprightly book of coffee-table dimensions, with seventy-four illustrative plates, a glossary, and, regrettably, no index rerum.

  It is not an easy book to read in bed. Because of the oversized folio format, each line on the page extends an inch or so longer than usual, resulting in eye-sweeps that must take in fourteen words at a time, rather than the more comfortable ten or eleven. As his shoulder muscles tire of supporting the full weight of the open book, the reader, lying on his left side, finally allows it to slump to the mattress and assume an L-position, and he then attempts to process the text with one open eye, which, instead of scanning left to right, reads by focusing outward along a radically foreshortened line of type that is almost parallel with his line of sight, skipping or supplying by guesswork those words that disappear beyond the gentle rise of the page. The gaps between each word narrow, hindering comprehension, although they never achieve that incomprehensible Greek ideal of page-layout called scriptio continua, in which the text is recorded unspaced as solid lines of letters.

  And why, in fact, did the Greeks relinquish so sensible a practice as word-spacing, which even the cuneiformists of Minoan Crete apparently used? Lejeune, for one, finds this development “remarquable”; but even more remarquable is the fact that the pragmatic Romans had word-spacing available to them (via the Etruscans), in the form of “interpuncts,” or hovering dots between each word (a practice successfully revived by Wang word-processing software in the 1980s), which they too abandoned in early Christian times. “For this amazing and deplorable regression one can conjecture no reason other than an inept desire to imitate even the worst characteristic of Greek books,” scolds Revilo P. Oliver. Dr. Parkes, on the other hand, theorizes that class differences between readers and scribes may have had something to do with the perseverance of scriptio continua—a scribal slave must not presume to word-space, or otherwise punctuate, because he would thereby be imposing his personal reading of the constitutive letters on his employer. There were also, in monkish contexts, quasi-mystical arguments to be made for unspaced impenetrability: a resistant text, slow to offer up its literal meaning, encouraged meditation and memorization, suggested Cassian (a prominent fifth-century recluse); and the moment when, after much futile staring, the daunting word-search-puzzle of the sacred page finally spaced itself out, coalescing into comprehensible units of the Psalter, might serve to remind the swooning lector of the miracle of the act of reading, which is impossible without God’s loving condescension into human language and human form.

  Amid all this phylogeny, Parkes does not mention, nor should he necessarily mention, the more mundane developmental fact that scriptio continua comes naturally to children:

  DEARANDREWH

  APPYBIRTHDA

  YILOVEYOULO

  VEALICEXXOX

  Children aren’t taught to forgo spacing; all their written models are properly spaced. Occasionally, as a concession to the recipient (or adult onlooker), they will go back and insert a virgule here and there between words for clarity. There is something so exciting about writing, perhaps, that, like barely literate five-year-olds, civilizations in the midst of discovering or rediscovering its pleasures and traditions take a while before they begin to care about casual readability—and consequently their scholars are said to study litterae, “letters,” not words.

  In part as a result of the unspaced line, pointing was viewed from the beginning as a form of ornament, as well as a means of what Parkes calls “disambiguation.” Cassiodorus, the first great biblical pointillist, advised sixth-century monks to add punctuation “in order that you may be seen to be adding embellishment.” Alcuin wrote Charlemagne that “Distinctiones or subdistinctiones by points can make embellishment in sentences most beautiful.” Early medieval readers like Dulcitius of Aquino would decorate a work with dots and diples and paragraph marks as they r
ead it and then proudly sign their name on the page: “I, Dulcitius, read this.” Punctuation, like marginal and interlinear commentary, seems at times to have been a ritual of reciprocation, a way of returning something to the text in grateful tribute after it had released its meaning in the reader’s mind.

  Somewhat surprisingly, scholastic philosophy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which is, as Francis Bacon uncharitably observed, a vast and intricate cobweb spun from Aristotle, “admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance and profit,” and thus ideally decorative and mannerist rather than functional, pushed by logical and dis-putational energy rather than pulled by truth—the sort of era, then, in which you might expect punctuation to thrive—turns out in fact to be a dark, sad time for subdistinctiones. Parkes explains that the paradigmatic nature of the scholastic manuscript, with its repetitive queriturs and quaestios signaling to the reader precisely where he was in the formal structure of the argument, made a sophisticated punctuational tool-set unnecessary.

  On the other hand, it may just be that the schoolmen, spending their days reading awful Latin translations from the Arabic of translations from the Greek, had no ear. Cicero himself disdained punctuation, insisting that the well-cadenced sentence would audibly manifest its own terminus, without the need of any mere “stroke interposed by a copyist”; but those who afterward took punctuation, and took Cicero, seriously—Cassiodorus, Isidore, Bembo, Petrarch—proved their allegiance by their virgulae: like archaizing composers who want to ensure a certain once-standard performance practice and therefore spell out every trill and every ritenuto, though their historical models offer only unadorned notes, these admirers could hear the implied punctuation of Ciceronian rhythm, and could in some cases duplicate his rollaway effects in their own writing, but they didn’t trust their contemporaries to detect a classicizing clausula without the help of visual aids.

  Dr. Parkes’s own prose is serviceable and unprecious, if non-passerine. For those of us whose Latin never quite took flight, he has provided translations of every passage he quotes. He takes care from time to time to mention political developments as they impinge on the punctuational sphere: if some depredation or upheaval happens to have brought on “a situation hostile to grammatical culture,” he says so. The puzzling thing, though, is how casual Parkes is—this eagle-eyed paleographer, who has worked so hard to “raise a reader’s consciousness of what punctuation is and does”!—about his commas. Where are they? “Pausing therefore was part of the process of reading not copying.” “Before the advent of printing a text left its author and fell among scribes.” “The printing process not only stabilized the shapes and functions of the symbols it also sustained existing conventions that governed the ways in which they were employed.” And: “This increase in the range of distinctive symbols also promoted new developments in usage since the symbols not only enabled readers to identify more easily the functions of grammatical constituents within a sentence but also made possible more subtle refinements in the communication of the message of a text.”

  Were it not for Dr. Parkes’s surefooted employment of the comma elsewhere, one might almost suspect that his was a case reminiscent of those psychotherapists who enter their profession because they sense something deeply amiss within themselves, or of those humorless people who buy joke books and go to comedy clubs to correct internal deficiencies. In a commentary accompanying a fascinating page of Richard Hooker, Parkes, or someone with whom he has shared (as he nicely says in his preface) “the burden of proofs,” flouts even the sacred law of the serial comma: “The notation series for indicating glosses notes and citations in the margins, based on letters of the alphabet in sequence, was also used in the Geneva Bible of 1560.”

  Once, however, Parkes surprises us by unconsciously using the old-fashioned, eighteenth-century that-comma. It is the comma of Gibbon—

  It has been calculated by the ablest politicians, that no state, without being soon exhausted, can maintain above the hundredth part of its members in arms and idleness.

  And of Gibbon’s model Montesquieu, in Nugent’s 1750 translation (twice)—

  Plato thanked the Gods, that he was born in the same age with Socrates: and for my part, I give thanks to the Almighty, that I was born a subject of that government under which I live; and that it is his pleasure I should obey those, whom he has made me love.

  And of Burke (twice)—

  Mr. Hume told me, that he had from Rousseau himself the secret of his principles of composition. That acute, though eccentric, observer had perceived, that to strike and interest the public, the marvellous must be produced …

  And of Burke’s brilliant adversary, Thomas Paine—

  Admitting that Government is a contrivance of human wisdom, it must necessarily follow, that hereditary succession, and hereditary rights (as they are called), can make no part of it, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary.

  Parkes writes, “The punctuation of the manuscript has been so freely corrected and adapted by later scribes, that it is not easy to determine whether any of the other ecphonetic signs are also by the original scribe or whether they have been added.” The only other person I can think of who uses old-style that-commas with any consistency is Peter Brown, who, like Parkes, spends his time with Latin quod-clauses that have been punctuated by old German commentators. (A comma is still regularly used before a daβ-clause in German.)

  Another rarity in Parkes’s book, perhaps the very first of its kind, is the occurrence of the two halves of semi-colon linked, not by a hyphen, but by a full-scale em-dash: semi—colon. This elongation could be Parkes’s secret way of protesting American trends in copy-editing, which would have the noun-unit spelled without any divisive internal rule at all: semicolon. Truly, American copy-editing has fallen into a state of demoralized confusion over hyphenated and unhyphenated compounds—or at least, I am demoralized and confused, having just gone through the manuscript of a novel in which a very smart and careful and good-natured copy-editor has deleted about two hundred of my innocent tinkertoy hyphens. I wrote “stet hyphen” in the margin so many times that I finally abbreviated it to “SH”—but there was no wicked glee in my intransigence: I didn’t want to be the typical prose prima donna who made her life difficult.

  On the other hand, I remembered an earlier manuscript of mine in which an event took place in the back seat of a car: in the bound galleys, the same event occurred in the “backseat.” The backseat. Grateful for hundreds of other fixes, unwilling to seem stubborn, I had agreed without protest to the closing-up, but I stewed about it afterward and finally reinserted a space before publication. (“Backseat” wants to be read as a trochee, BACKseat, like “baseball,” when in reality we habitually give both halves of the compound equal spoken weight.) Therefore, mindful of my near miss with “back seat,” I stetted myself sick over the new manuscript. I stetted re-enter (rather than reenter), post-doc (rather than postdoc), foot-pedal (rather than foot pedal), second-hand (rather than secondhand), twist-tie (rather than twist tie), and pleasure-nubbins (rather than pleasure nubbins).

  The copy-editor, because her talents permit her to be undoctrinaire, and because it is, after all, my book, indulged me, for better or worse. In passing, we had a stimulating discussion of the word pantyhose, which she had emended to read panty hose. My feeling was that the word hose is unused now in reference to footwear, and that panty, too, in its singular form, is imaginable only as part of pantywaist or in some hypothetical L. L. Bean catalog: “Bean’s finest chamois-paneled trail panty.” Pantyhose thus constitutes a single, interfused unit of sense, greater than the sum of its parts, which ought to be the criterion for jointure. And yet, though the suggested space seemed to me mistaken, I could just as easily have gone for panty-hose as pantyhose—in fact, normally I would have campaigned for a hyphen in this sort of setting, since the power-crazed policy-makers at Merriam-Webster and Words into Type have been reading too much Joyce in recent years and mak
ing condominiums out of terms (especially -like compounds, which can look like transliterated Japanese when closed up) that deserve semi-detachment. (Joyce, one feels, wanted his prose to look different, Irish, strange, not tricked out with fastidious Oxford hyphens that handled uncouth noun-clumps with gloved fingertips: he would have been embarrassed to see his idiosyncratic cuffedge and watchchain and famous scrotumtightening acting to sway US style-shepherds.) A tasteful spandex hyphen would have been, so my confusion whispers to me now, perfectly all right in panty-hose, pulling the phrase together scrotumtighteningly at its crotch.

  I offer this personal note merely to illustrate how small the moments are that cumulatively result in punctuational thigmotaxis. Evolution proceeds hyphen by hyphen, and manuscript by manuscript—impelled by the tension between working writers and their copy-editors, and between working copy-editors and their works of reference (“I’ll just go check the big Web,” a magazine editor once said to me cheerfully); by the admiration of ancestors, and by the ever-imminent possibility of paralysis through boredom. Are the marks that we have right now really enough? Don’t you sometimes feel a sudden abdominal cramp of revulsion when you scan down a column of type and see several nice little clauses (only one per sentence, of course: Chic. Man. St. § 5.91) set off by cute little pairs of unadorned dashes?