At the start of this chapter I cited Theodore Roosevelt’s vision of an America with one flag and one language. Two years earlier, in 1915, he had talked dismissively of what he called ‘Hyphenated Americans’. This was a familiar theme. ‘There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country,’ he had declared at the Republican Convention in 1906.10 Roosevelt was speaking against the background of a decade (1900–1910) in which more than eight million immigrants arrived in the United States. Woodrow Wilson, when he was President a decade later, would repeat the line, saying, ‘I think the most un-American thing in the world is a hyphen.’
Neither Roosevelt nor Wilson imagined that immigration would continue on this scale. But it has. For instance, between 2000 and 2005 there were roughly eight million immigrants to the US. A century after Roosevelt’s rhetoric, the hyphens he abhorred are flourishing. The Hyphenated American – the Chinese-American, Mexican-American, Italian-American, Greek-American, African-American, and so on – is everywhere. Yet the hyphen is a symbol of tension rather than of a truly comfortable pluralism. The novelist Toni Morrison has remarked, ‘In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.’11 As Morrison’s words indicate, the hyphen suggests an uneasy accommodation, a life lived either side of the hyphen rather than truly across it. It is for this reason that the hyphen’s position in these hybrid terms is under threat. Increasingly now, it is dropped when the compound term is used as a noun, though kept when it is used as an adjective. Prior to this paragraph, that is the practice I have observed.
This brings us, by an unlikely route, to the question of the more general status of the hyphen. A mark that has always been used capriciously, the hyphen is plainly not a letter, but it does not really function as punctuation either. It has two purposes: to connect two or more words as a compound, and to divide a word for typographical convenience or to show its distinct syllables. Many a reader has been thrown by a poorly managed word-break: leg-end rather than legend, and such bewildering items as une-lectable and poig-nant. Compounding also needs to be handled carefully. Hyphens are used in compounds to avoid a triple consonant (egg-gathering, still-life), to avoid a double or indeed triple vowel (bee-eating), where one of the words contributing to the compound contains an apostrophe (bull’seye, will-o’-the-wisp), where the compound consists of a repetition or of conflicting elements (ha-ha, sour-sweet), when denoting a colour (pale-bluish), as an aid to pronunciation (knee-deep, goose-step), in compound words built on other compounds where there is only one stress (great-grandfather, south-southeast), and usually in compounds where the second part is an adverb or a preposition (passer-by, go-between). Improvised compounds also tend to be hyphenated: young-boyish, honey-tempered.12 Compound words express something different from what is signified by their component parts. A great-grandfather is clearly different from a ‘great grandfather’, and if I describe someone as young-boyish it is not quite the same as saying he is young and boyish.
In practice, though, all of this is handled without method or conviction. In 2007 the editor of the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, Angus Stevenson, eliminated about 16,000 hyphens from a new edition of the work. ‘People are not confident about using hyphens any more,’ he said. ‘They’re not really sure what they’re for.’ As Charles McGrath explained in a piece for the New York Times, the casualties were most of the hyphens hitherto used to link the halves of compound nouns: fig-leaf and hobby-horse were fractured into fig leaf and hobby horse, while in other cases – crybaby, bumblebee – the previously semi-detached halves of words were squeezed together. Traditionally the hyphen had ‘indicated a sort of halfway point, a way station in the progress of a new usage’. Shakespeare was a hyphenator, introducing compounds such as fancy-free and sea-change. Modern graphic designers dislike them, though. The hyphen can be useful, as McGrath points out: ‘A slippery-eel salesman … sells slippery eels, while a slippery eel salesman takes your money and slinks away.’ But much of the time hyphens are an affectation; he likens them to spats, and reflects that amid the modern uncertainty about hyphenation a good many of us have been putting our spats on incorrectly.13
The hyphen, it seems, is in decline. This may sound improbable: after all, we are continually encountering new hyphenated compounds. Increasingly, though, the hyphen suggests something temporary and contested. When stability is achieved, the hyphen goes. The slow demise of the hyphen is not merely a matter of orthographic nicety or typographical felicity. Rather, it has a political dimension.
22
The comma flaps its wings
Punctuation: past, present and future
From the troublesome hyphen, it is but a short step to those other specks and spots so enticingly described by Pablo Picasso as the fig leaves hiding literature’s private parts. Punctuation is a subject that arouses strong feelings. A misused semi-colon or stray comma will cause some people the same violent distaste that I might feel on witnessing, say, a puppy being tortured. John Simon, expatiating on the decline of literacy, writes about the ‘peculiarly chilling’ confusion of quotation marks and apostrophes by the Los Angeles Times.1 The British journalist Victoria Moore reports that, seeing ‘martini’s’ and ‘classic’s’ on a cocktail menu, she was ‘caught up in a spasm of punctuation-rage’ and ‘asked the poor waitress what those two utterly extraneous apostrophes were doing there’. The result: ‘I momentarily lost my thirst.’2 There are even – no joke – punctuation vigilantes, who scamper around blotting out rogue apostrophes and rejigging punctuation – signs and advertisements being their favourite targets. The 2009 film Couples Retreat, in which ‘retreat’ was a noun rather than a verb, invited such attention.
One generally accepted idea about punctuation is that it indicates the flow of speech – or the intonation that should be used in performing a text. Before it was called punctuation, it was known as pointing, and it has also been referred to by the names distinction and stopping. Originally, the main purpose of punctuation was to guide a person who was reading aloud, indicating where there should be pauses and stresses. Punctuation is thus like a musical score. But it renders the music of speech imperfectly, and it is limiting to think of it merely as a way of transcribing the features of speech.
The first book in English concerned solely with punctuation was an anonymous treatise which appeared in 1680. It was not until 1768 that James Burrow became the first author to put his name to a work on the subject, and Joseph Robertson’s An Essay on Punctuation of 1785 was the first treatment to achieve popularity. ‘The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in WRITING,’ states Robertson.3 Really, though, it is the finite consequences of punctuation that make it valuable.
The role of punctuation is to enhance the precision of our meaning. It clarifies syntax: ‘“The bonobo,” said the zookeeper, “enjoys penis fencing”’ is in an important way different from ‘The bonobo said the zookeeper enjoys penis fencing’, and punctuation signals the difference. The units of sense are presented. We are provided with an apparatus that helps create understanding between writers and readers. A useful summary is provided by Walter Nash: ‘Punctuation … makes sense and projects attitudes.’4
Occasionally the omission of punctuation is championed by creative or contrary figures; well-known examples are the poets ee cummings and Guillaume Apollinaire. Poets like to knock the familiar frames of language sideways in order to suggest interesting incongruities. T. S. Eliot spoke of verse as its own system of punctuation, in which the usual marks are differently employed. Another kind of maverick argues that marks such as commas are aesthetically unclean and introduce false partitions between ideas. Usually, though, punctuation is an accessory of creativity. What is the difference in meaning between ‘After dinner, the men went into the living room’ and ‘After dinner the men went into the living room’? According to the New Yorker writer James Thurber, the magazine’s legendarily punctilious editor Harold Ross thought the comma after ‘dinner’ was a way of ‘giving the men time
to push back their chairs and stand up’.5 Does this seem laughable? Personally I find it both delightful and credible. Punctuation can achieve subtle effects, and thinking about the effect of punctuation on one’s readers is a far from trivial part of any kind of writing.
H. G. Wells’s Mr Polly is one of literature’s non-punctuators. Made to read the catechism and Bible ‘with the utmost industry and an entire disregard of punctuation or significance’, he is said to specialize in ‘the disuse of English’. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the ‘rude mechanical’ Peter Quince mangles the prologue to a play he is performing with his associates; the watching Duke of Athens remarks, ‘This fellow doth not stand upon points’ (meaning by ‘points’ the text’s marked punctuation), and his bride Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons, comments that ‘he hath played on this prologue like a child on a recorder; a sound, but not in government’. Hippolyta’s is a nice summary, and indeed punctuation is like government in that, while you need enough of it to keep order, it is quite possible to have too much.
For many readers, thoughts of punctuation will call to mind Eats, Shoots & Leaves, a book published in 2003 by the popular journalist and broadcaster Lynne Truss. Subtitled ‘The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation’, and seemingly impelled by Truss’s hatred of rogue apostrophes and slapdash emails, Eats, Shoots & Leaves is presented as a sane corrective to the madness of the modern world. In her second paragraph Truss describes a ‘satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes’ – a reference to a sign at a petrol station that reads ‘Come inside for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s’. Her horror is one most of us probably share, but the choice of the adjective ‘satanic’, which at first seems jaunty, begins to feel more pointed as Truss’s rhetorical questions swarm across the page. She proposes that ‘sticklers unite’, but admits that ‘every man is his own stickler’. This makes her conviction that ‘we should fight like tigers to preserve our punctuation’ hard to go along with.6 For whose is ‘our punctuation’? And, in any case, isn’t this notion of preserving it rose-tinted, falsely imagining a happy age of consummate comma use? Geoffrey Nunberg, an American commentator on language and politics, pithily defines the book’s spirit as ‘operatic indignation’ and says, of Truss’s brand of fussiness, ‘It’s like hearing someone warn of grave domestic security threats and then learning that he’s chiefly concerned about Canadian sturgeon-poaching on the US side of Lake Huron’.7 While readers were presumably not expected to act upon the suggestion that abusers of the apostrophe be hacked to death on the spot and buried in unmarked graves, it was clear that Truss intended to win converts.
But converts to what, exactly? ‘We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people,’ Truss writes, ‘except that we can see dead punctuation.’ This ‘dead punctuation’ is ‘invisible to everyone else – yet we see it all the time. No one understands us seventh-sense people.’ A few pages later she delights in the idea that good use of punctuation is a courtesy: ‘Isn’t the analogy with good manners perfect? Truly good manners are invisible.’8 So, correct punctuation is invisible, but errors of punctuation are constantly visible?
If this seems merely weird, a deeper problem is that Eats, Shoots & Leaves is unexpectedly sloppy and inconsistent. In a caustic review in the New Yorker, Louis Menand pointed out the many deficiencies of Truss’s writing, and observed, ‘The main rule in grammatical form is to stick to whatever rules you start out with, and the most objectionable thing about Truss’s writing is its inconsistency. Either Truss needed a copy editor or her copy editor needed a copy editor.’ Commas appeared in unexpected places, causing confusion. A rule about the semi-colon was announced, then flouted. Sometimes punctuation was absent where it was needed; Menand used as an example the statement ‘You have to give initial capitals to the words Biro and Hoover otherwise you automatically get tedious letters from solicitors.’ Truss, he suggested, was a Jeremiah full of dire warnings and angry harangues, addressing herself to the sort of people ‘who lose control when they hear a cell phone ring in a public place’.9 As David Crystal comments of Menand’s review, ‘This is one kind of zero tolerance being eaten by another.’10 Behind Truss’s sulphurous complaint lies a laudable belief that children should receive a better education in the use of written English. But she draws attention to the failure of education rather than putting forward a remedy. I doubt that many of the hundreds of thousands who have read Eats, Shoots have become more confident punctuators as a result. The book’s success has had a great deal to do with the existence of a large number of people out of love with modern living.
As Lynne Truss’s writing illustrates, the punctuation mark that inspires the most searing arguments is the apostrophe. Uncertainty about its correct use leads to overcompensation. You’ve seen this sort of thing: ‘Fresh Iceberg lettuce’s’, ‘Who’s turn is it?’, ‘He say’s he’s got a cold.’ The apostrophe has been amusingly described as ‘an entirely insecure orthographic squiggle’.11 It is, as this implies, often seen but rarely heard – ‘a device for the eye rather than for the ear’, which after a period of fairly stable use in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is ‘returning to the confusion from which it but recently emerged’.12 Promoted by the Parisian printer Geoffroy Tory in the 1520s, the apostrophe first appeared in an English text in 1559. There is a reference to it in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, and it is used in the 1596 edition of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, but it was rare before the seventeenth century.13 Initially it was employed to signify the omission of a sound in a text (usually a printed play). Then it came to signify possession, as can be seen in the Fourth Folio of Shakespeare’s works in 1685, and its possessive use was confined to the singular. But writers’ decisions about where to locate it in a word were haphazard, and in the eighteenth century its use became erratic. Some authors used it in the possessive plural, but authorities such as Lowth insisted this was wrong. John Ash’s Grammatical Institutes takes the same position, and Ash says that the possessive use of the apostrophe ‘seems to have been introduced by Mistake’.14 However, there were others at that time who, in a fashion that will incense many sticklers today, used it to form plurals; in 1712 the typographer Michael Mattaire suggested, for instance, that the correct plural of species was species’s. The apostrophe’s correct use was vigorously debated by grammarians throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As this brief account of the apostrophe indicates, punctuation comes and goes, and its history is more complicated than we may assume. A sketch of that history follows.
Early manuscripts had no punctuation at all, and those from the medieval period reveal a great deal of haphazard innovation, with more than thirty different punctuation marks. By the time of Chaucer legal documents contained few punctuation marks, if any, and among lawyers there is still a culture of minimal punctuation, as anyone who has muddled through a British property contract will have seen. The modern repertoire of punctuation emerged as printers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, rather than reproducing the marks they saw in the manuscripts from which they worked, moved to limit the range of marks. Printers worked with the craftsmen who cut their costly type-punches to create pleasing fonts, and, as more of these became available, a hierarchy of typefaces developed. The shapes of punctuation marks were fixed, and so were their functions.
The period, now usually called a full stop, is Greek in origin and was in wide use by the fifteenth century, though its role was ambiguous until the seventeenth. Commas were not employed until the sixteenth century; in early printed books in English one sees a virgule (a slash like this /), and the comma seems to have replaced this mark around 1520. Writing circa 1617, Alexander Hume could suggest, somewhat surprisingly, that when reading aloud one pronounced the comma ‘with a short sob’.15 Colons were common by the fourteenth century. The semi-colon, apparently introduced by the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius in 1494, was rare in English books before the early seventeenth century, when its exponents included Ben Jons
on and John Donne. Hyphens, discussed at the end of the previous chapter, were initially used only when a word was split between two lines of writing; Ben Jonson, a meticulous user of punctuation marks, was one of the first authors to use them in compound words. Dashes became common only in the eighteenth century, and were far more popular in French. Samuel Richardson, who printed his own works, popularized the em-dash with his novel Clarissa (1748).16
Exclamation and question marks were not much used until the seventeenth century. Ben Jonson referred to the former as admiration marks, and they were casually known by the names shriekmark and screamer before exclamation mark became standard; they too seem to have been adopted from the French. The caret, invariably known when I was a child as a ‘carrot’, has a long history; it has existed in its current form since the thirteenth century. There used also to be a clunky paragraph sign like this ¶, known as a pilcrow or a gallows bracket.17 Similar in its effect was one of the oldest punctuation symbols, now little employed, a horizontal ivy leaf called a hedera:
Parentheses were first used around 1500, having been observed by English writers and printers in Italian books. Manutius was one of the first to include them in the design of a font. A hundred years later they were common in the printed texts of dramas and were sometimes used to help guide readers through difficult passages in other kinds of writing (or to provide sententious comment). Over the past five hundred years they have gone by a variety of names including braces and hooks as well as the better-known brackets, and they have often been disparaged – by Lowth and Dr Johnson, among others. John Ash’s Grammatical Institutes contains the marvellous information: ‘A Parenthesis (to be avoided as much as possible) is used to include some Sentence in another’.18 Lindley Murray suggested that brackets had an ‘extremely bad’ effect; they were used by writers for ‘disposing of some thought’ for which they had not managed to find a ‘proper place’.19
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