by Lynne Truss
It should come as no surprise that writers take an interest in punctuation. I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, “I should have used fewer semicolons” – and although I have spent months fruitlessly trying to track down the chap responsible, I believe it none the less. If it turns out that no one actually did say this on their deathbed, I shall certainly save it up for my own.
What you have to remember about our punctuation system is that it is very limited. Writers jealous of their individual style are obliged to wring the utmost effect from a tiny range of marks – which explains why they get so desperate when their choices are challenged (or corrected) by copy-editors legislating according to a “house style”. You write the words “apple tree” and discover that house style is “apple-tree”. This hurts. The alteration seems simply perverse. And no one is immune. When Salman Rushdie’s story “Free Radio” (in his book East, West [1994]) was first published by Atlantic Monthly, I have heard that the magazine repunctuated its deliberately “logorrhoeic” narration without consulting him, presumably on the assumption that punctuation was something Rushdie was happy to leave to others, like the hoovering. Nicholson Baker, in an essay on the history of punctuation in his book The Size of Thoughts (1996), relates an emotional battle with his copy-editor over whether “pantyhose” (as written) should be altered to “panty hose”. Baker, incidentally, advocates the return of compound punctuation, such as commas with dashes (, –), semicolons with dashes (; –) and colons with dashes (: –); and in his book Room Temperature (1990), muses so poetically on the shape of the comma (“it recalled the pedals of grand pianos, mosquito larvae, paisleys, adult nostril openings, the spiralling decays of fundamental particles, the prows of gondolas … “) that – well, you’ve never heard anything like it.
See how the sense changes with the punctuation in this example:
Tom locked himself in the shed. England lost to Argentina.
These two statements, as they stand, could be quite unrelated. They merely tell you two things have happened, in the past tense.
Tom locked himself in the shed; England lost to Argentina.
We can infer from the semicolon that these events occurred at the same time, although it is possible that Tom locked himself in the shed because he couldn’t bear to watch the match and therefore still doesn’t know the outcome. With the semicolon in place, Tom locking himself in the shed and England losing to Argentina sound like two things that really got on the nerves of someone else. “It was a terrible day, Mum: Tom locked himself in the shed; England lost to Argentina; the rabbit electrocuted itself by biting into the power cable of the washing machine.”
Tom locked himself in the shed: England lost to Argentina.
All is now clear. Tom locked himself in the shed because England lost to Argentina. And who can blame him, that’s what I say.
It is sad to think people are no longer learning how to use the colon and semicolon, not least because, in this supreme QWERTY keyboard era, the little finger of the human right hand, deprived of its traditional function, may eventually dwindle and drop off from disuse. But the main reason is that, as Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, “The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.” Perspicuity and beauty of composition are not to be sneezed at in this rotten world. If colons and semicolons give themselves airs and graces, at least they also confer airs and graces that the language would be lost without.
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Cutting a Dash
In 1885, Anton Chekhov wrote a Christmas short story called “The Exclamation Mark”. In this light parody of A Christmas Carol, a collegiate secretary named Perekladin has a sleepless night on Christmas Eve after someone at a party offends him – by casting aspersions on his ability to punctuate in an educated way. I know this doesn’t sound too promising, but stick with it, it’s Chekhov, and the general rule is that you can’t go wrong with Chekhov. At this party, the rattled Perekladin insists that, despite his lack of a university education, forty years’ practice has taught him how to use punctuation, thank you very much. But that night, after he goes to bed, he is troubled; and then he is haunted. Scrooge-like, he is visited on this momentous Christmas Eve by a succession of spectres, which teach him a lesson he will never forget.
And what are these spectres? They are all punctuation marks. Yes, this really is a story about punctuation – and first to disturb Perekladin’s sleep is a crowd of fiery, flying commas, which Perekladin banishes by repeating the rules he knows for using them. Then come full stops; colons and semicolons; question marks. Again, he keeps his head and sends them away. But then a question mark unbends itself, straightens up – and Perekladin realises he is stumped. In forty years he has had no reason to use an exclamation mark! He has no idea what it is for. The inference for the reader is clear: nothing of any emotional significance has ever happened to Perekladin. Nothing relating, in any case, to the “delight, indignation, joy, rage and other feelings” an exclamation mark is in the business of denoting.
As epiphanies go, this isn’t quite the same as seeing Tiny Tim’s ownerless crutch propped in the inglenook, but Perekladin is affected none the less.
The poor pen-pusher felt cold and ill at ease, as if he had caught typhus. The exclamation mark was no longer standing behind his closed eyes but in front of him, in the room, by his wife’s dressing-table, and it was winking at him mockingly.
Translation: Harvey Pitcher in Chekhov,
The Comic Stories, 1998
What can poor Perekladin do? When he hails a cab on Christmas Day, he spots immediately that the driver is an exclamation mark. Things are getting out of hand. At the home of his “chief”, the doorman is another exclamation mark. It is time to take a stand – and, signing himself into the visitors’ book at his chief’s house, Perekladin suddenly sees the way. Defiantly he writes his name, “Collegiate Secretary Yefim Perekladin” and adds three exclamation marks, “!!!”
And as he wrote those three marks, he felt delight and indignation, he was joyful and he seethed with rage.
“Take that, take that!” he muttered, pressing down hard on the pen.
And the phantom exclamation mark disappears.
Most of us can’t remember a time before we learned to punctuate. We perhaps remember learning to read and to spell, but not the moment when we found out that adding the symbol “!” to a sentence somehow changed the tone of voice it was read in. Luckily we are taught such stuff when we are young enough not to ask awkward questions, because the way this symbol “!” turns “I can’t believe it” into “I can’t believe it!” is the sort of dizzying convention that requires to be taken absolutely on trust. Of my own exclamation-mark history (which is not one to be proud of) all I can clearly recollect of its early days is that the standard keyboard of a manual typewriter in the 1970s – on which I did my first typing – did not offer an exclamation mark. You had to type a full stop, then back-space and type an apostrophe on top of it. Quite a deterrent to expressive punctuation, Mister Remington. But in fact, of course, all one’s resourceful back-space/shift-key efforts only added to the satisfaction of seeing the emphatic little black blighter sitting cheerfully on the page.
This chapter is about expressive, attention-seeking punctuation – punctuation that cuts a dash; punctuation that can’t help saying it with knobs on, such as the exclamation mark, the dash, the italic. Of course the effect of such marks can be overrelied on; of course they are condemned by Gertrude Stein (strange woman). Yet I can’t help thinking, in its defence, that our system of punctuation is limited enough already without us dismissing half of it as rubbish. I say we should remember the fine example of Perekladin, who found catharsis in an exclamation mark, and also of the French 19th-century novelist Victor Hugo, who – when he wanted to know how Les Misérables was selling – reportedly telegraphed his publisher with the simple i
nquiry “?” and received the expressive reply “!”
Everyone knows the exclamation mark – or exclamation point, as it is known in America. It comes at the end of a sentence, is unignorable and hopelessly heavy-handed, and is known in the newspaper world as a screamer, a gasper, a startler or (sorry) a dog’s cock. Here’s one! And here’s another! In humorous writing, the exclamation mark is the equivalent of canned laughter (F. Scott Fitzgerald – that well-known knockabout gag-man – said it was like laughing at your own jokes), and I can attest there is only one thing more mortifying than having an exclamation mark removed by an editor: an exclamation mark added in.
Despite all the efforts of typewriter manufacturers, you see, the exclamation mark has refused to die out. Introduced by humanist printers in the 15th century, it was known as “the note of admiration” until the mid 17th century, and was defined – in a lavishly titled 1680 book Treatise of Stops, Points, or Pauses, and of Notes which are used in Writing and Print; Both very necessary to be well known And the Use of each to be carefully taught – in the following rhyming way:
This stop denotes our Suddain Admiration,
Of what we Read, or Write, or giv Relation,
And is always cal’d an Exclamation.
Ever since it came along, grammarians have warned us to be wary of the exclamation mark, mainly because, even when we try to muffle it with brackets (!), it still shouts, flashes like neon, and jumps up and down. In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly. Traditionally it is used:
1 in involuntary ejaculations: “Phew! Lord love a duck!”
2 to salute or invoke: “O mistress mine! Where are you roaming?”
3 to exclaim (or admire): “How many goodly creatures are there here!”
4 for drama: “That’s not the Northern Lights, that’s Manderley!”
5 to make a commonplace sentence more emphatic: “I could really do with some Opal Fruits!”
6 to deflect potential misunderstanding of irony: “I don’t mean it!”
Personally, I use exclamation marks for email salutations, where I feel a “Dear Jane” is over-formal. “Jane!” I write, although I am beginning to discover this practice is not universally acceptable. I suppose the rule is: only use an exclamation mark when you are absolutely sure you require such a big effect. H. W. Fowler said, “An excessive use of exclamation marks is a certain indication of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.” On the other hand, it sometimes seems hurtful to suppress the exclamation mark when – after all – it doesn’t mean any harm to anyone, and is so desperately keen.
The question mark, with its elegant seahorse profile, takes up at least double the space on the page of an exclamation mark, yet gets on people’s nerves considerably less. What would we do without it? Like the exclamation mark, it is a development of the full stop, a “terminator”, used only at the ends of sentences, starting out as the punctus interrogativus in the second half of the 8th century, when it resembled a lightning flash, striking from right to left. The name “question mark” (which is rather a dull one, quite frankly) was acquired in the second half of the 19th century, and has never caught on universally. Journalists dictating copy will call it a “query”, and – while we are on the subject of dictation – in this passage from P. G. Wodehouse’s Over Seventy (1957) it is delightfully called something else:
How anybody can compose a story by word of mouth face to face with a bored-looking secretary with a notebook is more than I can imagine. Yet many authors think nothing of saying, “Ready, Miss Spelvin? Take dictation. Quote No comma Sir Jasper Murgatroyd comma close quotes comma said no better make it hissed Evangeline comma quote I would not marry you if you were the last man on earth period close quotes Quote Well comma I’m not comma so the point does not arise comma close quotes replied Sir Jasper twirling his moustache cynically period And so the long day wore on period. End of chapter.”
If I had to do that sort of thing I should be feeling all the time that the girl was saying to herself as she took it down, “Well comma this beats me period How comma with homes for the feebleminded touting for custom on every side comma has a man like this succeeded in remaining at large mark of interrogation.”
Question marks are used when the question is direct:
What is the capital of Belgium?
Have you been there?
Did you find the people very strange?
When the question is inside quotation marks, again it is required:
“Did you try the moules and chips?” he asked.
But when the question is indirect, the sentence manages without it:
What was the point of all this sudden interest in Brussels, he wondered.
I asked if she had something in particular against the Belgian national character.
Increasingly people are (ignorantly) adding question marks to sentences containing indirect questions, which is a bit depressing, but the reason is not hard to find: blame the famous upward inflection caught by all teenage viewers of Neighbours in the past twenty years. Previously, people said “you know?” and “know what I’m saying?” at the end of every sentence. Now they don’t bother with the words and just use the question marks, to save time. Everything ends up becoming a question? I’m talking about statements? It’s getting quite annoying? But at least it keeps the question mark alive so it can’t be all bad?
Deciding which way round to print the question mark wasn’t as straightforward as you might think, incidentally. In its traditional orientation, with the curve to the right, it appears to cup an ear towards the preceding prose, which seems natural enough, though perhaps only because that’s how we are used to seeing it. But people have always played around with it. In the 16th century the printer Henry Denham had the sophisticated idea of reversing the mark when indicating a rhetorical question (to differentiate it from a direct question), but it didn’t catch on. You can imagine other printers muttering uncertainly, “Rhetorical question? What’s a rhetorical question? Is this a rhetorical question?” – and not being able to answer. The Spanish Academy, however, in 1754 ratified the rather marvellous and flamboyant idea of complementing terminal question marks and exclamation marks with upside-down versions at the beginnings, thus:
¡Lord, love a duck!
¿Doesn’t Spanish look different from everything else now we’ve done this?
And it’s not a bad system at all. Evidently Bill Gates has personally assured the Spanish Academy that he will never allow the upside-down question mark to disappear from Microsoft word-processing programs, which must be reassuring for millions of Spanish-speaking people, though just a piddling afterthought as far as he’s concerned. Meanwhile, in Hebrew the question mark is exactly the same as our own, despite the fact that it ought logically to be flipped into reverse, since the words run from right to left. Remember Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady: “The Arabs learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning / The Hebrews learn it backwards, which is absolutely frightening”? So we have an interesting and perverse perceptual problem in Hebrew: with the question mark the same way round as our own, it looks back to front.
Unsurprisingly, Gertrude Stein was not a fan of the question mark. Are you beginning to suspect – as I am – that there was something wrong at home? Anyway, Stein said that of all punctuation marks the question mark was “the most completely uninteresting”:
It is evident that if you ask a question you ask a question but anybody who can read at all knows when a question is a question […] I never could bring myself to use a question mark, I always found it positively revolting, and now very few do use it.
Since Stein wrote these remarks in 1935, it’s interesting that she thought the question mark was on the way out, even then. Those
of us brought up with the question-mark ethic are actually horrified when a direct question is written without a question mark – as in, for example, the film title Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Unmarked questions left dangling in this way make me feel like an old-fashioned headmaster waiting for a child to remember his manners. “And?” I keep wanting to say. “And?” “Can you spare any old records,” it still says in that charity-shop window – only now it’s a printed sign, not a handwritten one. Every time I pass it, it drives me nuts. Meanwhile, as Kingsley Amis points out in his The King’s English, many people start sentences with words such as, “May I crave the hospitality of your columns” and then get so involved in a long sentence that they forget it started as a question, so finish it with a full stop.
To do so not only sends the interested reader, if there is one, back to the start to check that the fellow did at any rate start to ask a direct question, it also carries the disagreeable and perhaps truthful suggestion that the writer thinks a request from the likes of him is probably a needless politeness to the likes of the editor.
What a marvellous little aside, by the way: “if there is one”.
Of all the conventions of print that make no objective sense, the use of italics is the one that puzzles most. How does it work? Yet ever since italic type was invented in the 15th century, it has been customary to mix italic with roman to lift certain words out of the surrounding context and mark them as special. None of the marks in this chapter so far has anything to do with grammar, really. They are all to do with symbolically notating the music of the spoken language: of asking the question “?” and receiving the answer “!” Italics have developed to serve certain purposes for us that we never stop to question. When was the last time you panicked in the face of italics, “Hang on, this writing’s gone all wobbly”? Instead we all know that italics are the print equivalent of underlining, and that they are used for: