Making a Point
Page 28
The arrival of the Internet is not the end of punctuation as we know it. Rather, as Hale and Scanlon suggest, we live in two punctuation worlds now – one standard, the other nonstandard. The situation parallels what we see in the more general linguistic scenario that sociolinguists call diglossia (the simultaneous use in a society of a language that has two contrasting varieties, such as Classical Arabic and colloquial Arabic) – only here we would need to call it digraphia. In the offline world, Standard English punctuation is still alive and well; in the online world, nonstandard punctuation is alive and well. But the situation is mixed, for only certain genres of online writing display the wildness Hale and Scanlon observed. Quite a few online sites – most of the Web, and many bloggers and social networkers – remain faithful to traditional punctuation norms.
The essential first step, in the modern management of punctuation, is to understand what’s going on in those genres where nonstandard punctuation is the default practice. For a young learner (and for older users too) the challenge is not to mix the two worlds up. The media panic is that new punctuation habits learned in the online nonstandard world will transfer to the offline standard one. For teachers, the challenge is to draw their students’ attention to the stylistic differences between standard and nonstandard usage. And for this to happen, a grasp of what is taking place online is a necessary first step.
The foundation of this understanding comes from the perspectives I introduced earlier in this book. The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is crucial. As my earlier chapters illustrated, punctuation is only occasionally semantically necessary: there are very few occasions – pace St Augustine and Lynne Truss – when a punctuation mark is essential to expressing a meaning. Eats, Shoots & Leaves works well as a joke precisely because it is so rare. And examples such as its and it’s are persuasive only when viewed in isolation – something that never happens in real life. There can never really be confusion between it’s and its, because they never occur in the same part of a sentence – one being a possessive pronoun, used before a noun (as in the tree has shed its leaves) and the other being a subject+verb (as in it’s very interesting).
There are few semantic grounds for valuing punctuation. But there are unassailable pragmatic grounds. Punctuation is, firstly, a recognized feature of Standard English. It isn’t the most important feature: that accolade belongs to spelling, because every word has to be spelled acceptably, whereas punctuation by its nature is sporadic. It is, however, far more noticeable than nonstandard grammatical constructions (ain’t, I was sat, haven’t got nothing, etc) as these turn up relatively infrequently compared to punctuation marks. As a result, if writers punctuate badly in settings where standard English is expected, and make a mistake in such words as its, the errors are likely to be noticed, and the perpetrator judged accordingly.
But punctuation is important for more than just reasons of social expectation and acceptability. It has proved to be valuable in aiding swift comprehension, especially as texts have become longer, more complex, and more varied over the centuries. It helps writers to organize their thoughts on the page, and it helps readers to process continuous text with a minimum of discomfort. While it’s possible to read a piece of text without any punctuation at all and still understand it without ambiguity – as we saw at the very beginning of this book – such a task is undeniably more difficult. You can prove this to yourself quite easily, replicating the kind of study done in readability research. Take a paragraph; omit all punctuation; and monitor yourself (or someone else) reading it. Then do the same with the punctuated text. There will be more pauses and false starts in the unpunctuated text. Your eye-movements will dart about, as you look ahead for cues that would normally be found in the punctuation. You will understand the text well enough, but it’s likely to have been an uncomfortable experience, and later you will have greater difficulty remembering what it was about.
This kind of exercise is illuminating only if the texts are of some length. Omitting punctuation in a short text presents few if any problems. After all, we see this every day of our lives in street signs, notices, posters, and many other settings. There’s no punctuation after the words GIVE WAY or STOP WHEN LIGHTS ARE RED. And most titles of books aren’t punctuated, even if they are long, such as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat or The High Rise Glorious Skittle Skat Roarious Sky Pie Angel Food Cake. So we might expect online users to be most ready to dispense with standard punctuation in genres where messages are short, such as texting, Twitter, instant messaging, brief emails, and chatroom or forum exchanges. Which is exactly what we find.
But dispensing with standard punctuation doesn’t mean using no punctuation at all, even though this does sometimes happen. There’s usually some sort of punctuation present. And quite intricate uses have developed, a few of which I’ve mentioned in earlier chapters, such as the use of ellipsis dots (…) to show incompleteness on Twitter, or the omission of a final period or the use of an exclamation mark to convey warmth and rapport. URL domain names have their own punctuation ‘grammar’. They disallow spaces between words: a sequence needs to be linked using hyphens (www.this-is-my-site.com). Dots can only appear as component separators. Domain names are also case-insensitive: this-ismy-site and THIS-IS-MY-SITE would point to the same place. A further option, avoiding hyphens, is to use camel-case, as in ThisIsMySite.
The asterisk is another mark that has developed a little system of its own. In traditional publishing, it started life as a footnote marker, then came to be used as a mark of letter omission, as noted by Lindley Murray, and as a section separator in novels. In the nineteenth century it competed with the long dash as a way of hiding a sensitive word, or a part of a word (d***, d**n) – a practice that had become so common, by the end of the fastidious Victorian era, that it attracted the attention of Mr Punch, who in his issue of 15 December 1909 commented on ‘an improvement in trade’:
The type-founders are now working overtime making asterisks in order to cope with the huge demand which has sprung up since the action of the Libraries in regard to a certain type of fiction.
If he were still around today, he would doubtless have had much more to say about the proliferation of asterisks in Internet settings, where they can mark a semantic comment (*sigh*) or emphasis (‘there was a *third* man’). In fact, asterisk semantics is even more subtle, as it allows two degrees of intensity:
I said *don’t do it*
I said *don’t* *do* *it*
And he would doubtless have been even more scathing about the terminological profusion that surrounds the symbol: star, splat, wildcard, dingle, spider, aster, twinkle …
The other really noticeable Internet mark is the slash – another term that attracts alternative names, such as slant, solidus, virgule, diagonal, and oblique. The mark is widely used in offline contexts, such as:
a substitute for or: ‘he/she’, ‘hot/cold’
a substitute for and: ‘the Smith/Brown review’, ‘2005/6’
a mark of abbreviation: ‘w/o’ [=without], ‘c/o’ [care of]
a separator in dates: ’1/1/16’ [=1 January 2016]
In more specialized contexts we see it, for example:
in literature, marking a line-break in a poem or play: ‘Double, double toil and trouble: / Fire, burn; and cauldron, bubble’
in mathematics, showing a fraction or division: 1/3
in linguistics, showing a sound-unit to be a phoneme: /t/
in transcribing a conversation, to show where one person’s speech overlaps with another: A So I really think he should / try a different
B He ought to, you know
Usually, slashes have no spaces on either side; but some style guides recommend them to aid visual clarity, especially when separating compound words or a long sequence of items:
New York/Los Angeles
New York / Los Angeles
the verbs ask/say/reply/declare/suggest form a class …
the verbs ask / say / reply
/ declare / suggest form a class …
That’s the situation in the offline world. What’s happening online?
The Internet has added something new: there are now two kinds of slash – forward and (since the 1980s) backward (backslash). The latter arose within various programming languages, and is most often encountered in everyday computer use as a component separator in a Windows file path (C: FileDC). It has had relatively little use outside technical contexts, though it’s sometimes seen in chat exchanges or online games, where it marks an emotion, action, or reaction, such as faints or join. Forward slashes are far more common in these functions, though – so much so that when someone is reading a command or address aloud, the adjective forward is often omitted, and we hear a string such as ‘original pronunciation dot com slash analysis’.
Forward slashes are universal in URL addresses, the norm for commands in games, and present in the file paths on Mac and Unix systems. The vertical bar (or pipe, |), part of the standard keyboard, adds a further option as a separator.
Several other orthographic conventions have emerged on the Internet, some of which have their origins in traditional publishing. For example:
S P A C I N G shows that something is ‘loud and clear’
CAPITALS convey a ‘shouting’ tone of voice
_underbars_ (or _underscores_), mark emphasis and general highlighting, and offer an alternative to italics or colour in titles : _The English Language_
Usage varies among Internet genres, online groups, and individual users. But everyone who emails uses the @ sign – the locator symbol chosen by Ray Tomlinson in 1971 because it was a symbol that wasn’t being used in names or in computer programming, and yet was already familiar from commercial settings. As a symbol with independent meaning (= ‘at’), it lives on the edge of the punctuation system, but its function is similar: it both links (two elements in an address) and separates. And this is the reason any book on punctuation should mention other symbols that perform these roles.
Several of these were noticed by the early grammarians, such as Lindley Murray, who compiled a list of ‘other characters’ at the end of his chapter on punctuation. I’ve dealt with most of them in earlier chapters, but four items in his list have not yet been described. Terminology has since proliferated (especially online), and functions have sometimes changed, but the symbols are constant:
the caret (^) – marking an omission (from Latin caret, ‘it lacks’), but now with technical usage in mathematics and programming; alternative names include hat and uparrow
an obelisk (†) – alerting the reader to a footnote or marginal comment – also called an obelus or dagger and (in cases where a page has many footnotes) repeated as a double (†† or ‡) or even triple sign; today more commonly used along with a name to show death or extinction, or along with a word to show that it is obsolete
parallels (||) – another way of alerting the reader to a footnote or marginal comment
an index or hand () – pointing out something that requires special attention, and also called by such names as a fist (by printers), manicule (Latin: ‘little hand’), index, pointer, or pointing finger; a feature of early manuscripts, it was very popular in nineteenth-century signs and advertisements, but is rarely seen today
If Murray were writing now, he would have to add this one:
# – a symbol with a long history of specialized uses (a sharp in music, a checkmate in chess, a space in proofreading …), as well as the routine way of showing a numeral (#3, Symphony #1) in American English; it has come into its own on Twitter, where it is used to mark keywords or topics in a tweet (a hashtag); its many labels include hash (especially in British English), pound (especially in the US, but not in Britain for obvious financial reasons), gate, mesh, sharp, crunch, hex, flash, and octothorpe
This by no means exhausts the punctuational novelty we find on the Internet. Users have always sensed the tension between a medium that is conversational in character yet mostly graphic in operation. The lack of the features of normal face-to-face conversational interaction – pitch, loudness, speed, rhythm, tone of voice, facial expression, gesture – was the motivation for the emoticon (or smiley), in which punctuation marks obtained a new lease of life, combined in ingenious ways with letters and numerals to replicate facial expressions and bodily movements. Some emoticons are semantic entities in their own right (a dancing figure, a hug, a kiss), replacing whole utterances:
so I’ll see you tomorrow
:))
But some operate just like punctuation, appearing at the end of sentences as a kind of ‘period with presence’, informally reinforcing or manipulating the interpretation of what has just been said and offering a clarification in cases of potential ambiguity.
I don’t think I’ll be able to go :(
John’s a real idiot to say that :) [i.e. I’m actually happy he said that]
Emoticons have attracted a level of interest that far exceeds their communicative significance. They were never used as often as first impressions suggested. Studies of Internet genres repeatedly showed their occurrence in only a minority of online interactions – usually around 10–20 per cent. Some genres (such as instant messaging) used them more than others (such as blogging), but none displayed the extraordinary diversity listed in the flurry of potboiler net-speak dictionaries that were published in the 1990s, in which innovators seemed to be competing to create the weirdest and coolest emoticons.
Mickey Mouse 8(:-)
Homer Simpson (_8(|)
The genre moved well beyond everyday communication into creative graphics reflecting contemporary crazes. Vampires?
:-[
But that’s just your bog-standard vampire. An entire family emerged:
%-[ a confused vampire
/:-[ a vampire with a beret
:-E a buck-toothed vampire
:-F a buck-toothed vampire with one tooth missing
etc
This is an art form, not communication. And it was rare indeed to see one of these creations appearing in real online interactions. Just a handful of basic emoticons turned up routinely, such as the smile, the frown, the wink, and the surprise, sometimes with intensification:
:) :( ;) :0 – sometimes with the nose added :-)
:) :)) :)))
Age was a factor: the younger the person, the more likely messages would use emoticons. Gender was a factor too: girls used them more than boys.
But all of this is becoming history now. Software developments have substituted colourful icons for the original symbol clusters. My computer offers me the choice of nearly 200 ready-made emoticons. Fashions also change. There was a flurry of publicity about Japanese emoji in 2015. Yet, when I visited a school that year, where the class collected a corpus of online interactions, I saw no emoticons at all – and no texting abbreviations either. When I asked why not, I was told they weren’t cool any more. And one student commented: ‘I stopped using them when my parents started.’
One reason for the falling-off is probably that emoticons didn’t live up to expectations. They were thought to be a way of making the meaning and intention of messages clearer, but in practice they were just as ambiguous as unsmileyed text. Any individual emoticon allows several readings. How would you interpret :)? Happiness, joke, sympathy, good mood, delight, amusement, complacency, sarcasm …? The only way is to look at the verbal context, and to take into account what you know about the sender and the present communicative situation. It’s a common experience that a smile can go down the wrong way. ‘Wipe that smile off your face.’ And users were uncomfortable with emoticon inflation – the pressure to keep using them in a message, to avoid giving the impression that a sentence which lacked one had a different intention behind it. I’ve had emails in which every paragraph ended in the same emoticon. When that happens, they begin to lose their value. Someone who’s always smiling isn’t
smiling.
A moderate use of a few emoticons will probably remain a feature of online interaction. They are a modern instance of the need for new orthographic devices to clarify written meaning. Long before the Internet arrived, there was the percontation point (p. 194), and more recently the interrobang. The American satirist Andrew Bierce wrote a language-reform essay called ‘For brevity and clarity’ in which he recommended the use of what he called a ‘snigger point, or note of cachinnation [loud laughter]’ to show a smiling mouth. That was in 1887. Today, the concern has been to find an unambiguous way of identifying irony or sarcasm, in view of the way many messages fail to have their ironic content perceived by the reader. Some try using exclamation marks to get round the problem, but these are ambiguous. Some use a (static or dynamic) winking emoticon ;-) but that’s ambiguous too. This has motivated various suggestions for a semantically specific symbol, which can only mean sarcasm, such as the inverted exclamation mark, a reversed question mark (similar to the percontation mark), a zigzag exclamation mark, a dot inside a single spiral line (the SarcMark), and a period before a tilde (the snark mark, .~).
There are many other possibilities waiting to be discovered – or rediscovered, for many earlier proposals have sunk without trace. An exclamation mark or question mark with a comma underneath, to be used mid-sentence? Tried out in Canada in the 1990s. Double colons? Used by fantasy writer Piers Anthony to identify one of his characters in his Kirlian novels (he called them quadpoints). An exclamation mark with a dash through it, to show certitude? Done by French author Hervé Bazin in the 1960s. A combination of two exclamation marks sharing the same dot, to show acclamation? Bazin again. A pair of question marks sharing the same dot, with the right-hand one reversed to face its mate, to show affection? Bazin again. And who knows which of these might not one day go viral, and become a regular part of our punctuation system?