by Lynne Truss
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 unfettered – and only slightly undermined its case by requiring such a lot of punctuation in the title.
By the imagination without strings [wrote Marinetti] I mean the absolute freedom of images or analogies, or expressed with unhampered words and with no connecting strings of syntax and with no punctuation.
Marinetti wanted to explode the “so-called typographical 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.
On the same page, therefore, we will use three or four colours of ink, or even twenty different typefaces if necessary. For example: italics for a series of swift sensations, boldface for violent onomatopoeias, and so on. With this typographical revolution and this multicoloured variety in the letters I mean to redouble the expressive force of words.
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.
I can scribble the word “bomb” barely legibly 18 times in one minute and “bom” 24 times, saving 25 per cent per minute by dropping the superfluous b. In the British Commonwealth, on which the sun never sets, and in the United States of North America, there are always millions of people continually writing, writing, writing … Those who are writing are losing time at the rate of 131,400 X x per annum …
Abraham Tauber (ed.),
George Bernard Shaw on Language, 1965
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:
Not only should titles not be printed in italic; but the customary ugly and unnecessary inverted commas should be abolished. Let me give a specimen. 1. I was reading The Merchant of Venice. 2. I was reading “The Merchant of Venice.” 3. I was reading The Merchant of Venice. The man who cannot see that No. 1 is the best looking as well as the sufficient and sensible form, should print or write nothing but advertisements for lost dogs or ironmongers’ catalogues: literature is not for him to meddle with.
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:
Andrew 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 hidebound 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? Whatever 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 Capo
te 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 secondhand 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 sideways, 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!
: – r
It looks like it’s sticking its tongue out! The permutations may be endless:
: ~/ mixed up!
<: – ) dunce!
: – [ pouting!
: –O surprise!
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 a playful 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”?
“Yes, you can see the bullet points here, here and here, sir; there are multiple backslashes, of course. And that’s a forward slash. I would have to call this a frenzied attack. Did anyone hear the interrobang?”
“Oh yes. Woman next door was temporarily deafened by it. What’s this?”
“Ah. You don’t see many of these any more. It’s an emoticon. Hold your head this way and it appears to be winking.”
“Good God! You mean – ?”
“That’s the mouth.”
“You mean – ?”
“That’s the nose.”
“Good grief. Then it’s – ?”
“Oh yes, sir. There’s no doubt about it, sir. The Punctuation Murderer has struck again.”
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:
The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate America, which has become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words and mangled syntax so acceptable in cyberspace. The CEO of LoseItAll.com, an Internet startup, said the virus had rendered him helpless. “Each time I tried to send one particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error message: ‘Your dependent clause preceding your independent clause must be set off by commas, but one must not precede the conjunction.’ I threw my laptop across the room.”
… If Strunkenwhite makes emailing impossible, it could mean the end to a communication revolution once hailed as a significant timesaver. A study of 1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J., found that e-mail increased employees’ productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less time to formulate their thoughts. (The same study also found that they lost 2.2 hours of productivity because they were emailing so many jokes to their spouses, parents and stockbrokers.)
… “This is one of the most complex and invasive examples of computer code we have ever encountered. We just can’t imagine what kind of devious mind would want to tamper with e-mails to create this burden on communications,” said an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via the telephone out of concern that trying to e-mail his comments could leave him tied up for hours.
Hirschfield’s story ended with the saddest invention of all:
<
br /> Meanwhile bookstores and online booksellers reported a surge in orders for Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style.”
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:
“What use are Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones and’Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
“They are merely conventional signs!”
Lewis Carroll,
The Hunting of the Snark, 1876
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 preserve 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 we value 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.