Making a Point

by David Crystal

  Interlude: Punctuation eccentricity

  At the top of any list of punctuation eccentrics, I would firmly place an American businessman, the self-styled Lord Timothy Dexter (1748–1806), who became rich through marrying a wealthy widow and then engaging in a series of naive business adventures that should have failed but somehow succeeded. Of all the stories of his odd behaviour, some no doubt legendary, none is more bizarre than his mock demise. A death obsessive who slept in his coffin, he wanted to know how he would be mourned, so he had his death announced, planned a full-scale funeral, and invited people to a wake – attended, it’s said, by over 3000. After his resurrection, so the story goes, he beat his wife for not crying enough!

  In 1802 he published a short book about himself, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress, full of deviant spellings, erratic capitals, and no punctuation. This is not the playful spelling we see in the essays of Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, and other late nineteenth-century writers. This is from someone who left school at the age of eight and worked on a farm. Here are the opening lines (with my translation):

  IME the first Lord in the younited States of A mericary Now of Newburyport it is the voise of the peopel and I cant Help it and so Let it goue Now as I must be Lord there will foller many more Lords pretty soune for it dont hurt A Cat Nor the mouse Nor the son Nor the water Nor the Eare then goue on all is Easey Now bons broaken all is well all in Love Now I be gin to Lay the corner ston and the kee ston with grat Remembrence of my father Jorge Washington the grate herow 17 sentreys past before we found so good a father to his shildren and Now gone to Rest …

  [I’m the first Lord in the United States of America, now of Newburyport. It is the voice of the people and I can’t Help it and so Let it go. Now as I must be Lord there will follow many more Lords pretty soon, for it don’t hurt a cat nor the mouse, nor the sun, nor the water, nor the air. Then go on. All is easy. No bones broken. All is well. All in Love. Now I begin to lay the cornerstone and the keystone with great remembrance of my father, George Washington, the great hero. 17 centuries passed before we found so good a father to his children, and now gone to rest …]

  When people complained that it was difficult to read, he added an extra page in the second edition, which begins:

  fouder mister printer the Nowing ones complane of my book the fust edition had no stops I put in A Nuf here and thay may peper and solt it as they plese

  [Further, Mr. Printer, the Knowing Ones complain of my book the first edition had no stops. I put in enough here and they may pepper and salt it as they please.]

  And he is as good as his word. This is what follows:

  34

  Pragmatic tolerance

  If I had to use one word to summarize the approach to punctuation I have used in this book, it would be pragmatic. A pragmatic approach, as I characterized it in Chapter 11, studies the choices we make when we use language, the reasons for those choices, and the effects those choices convey. It is an approach that focuses on explanations rather than prescriptions. Those who adopt this approach believe in confronting the realities of a complex situation rather than simplifying them to the point that they no longer relate to everyday linguistic experience. They believe that by understanding a problem, we are halfway towards solving it. In everyday usage, pragmatic is opposed to dogmatic. There are some things we can be dogmatic about in language, but punctuation is not one of them.

  So my approach is in clear contrast to what has been called the ‘zero tolerance’ approach to punctuation, famously the subtitle of Lynne Truss’s best-selling Eats, Shoots & Leaves. I’ve written a riposte to that book already (The Fight for English, 2006), so I won’t repeat the arguments here. My view comes down to this simple statement: it is not possible to be zero tolerant about a linguistic system that contains so much uncertainty. Every one of the descriptive chapters in the present book encounters genre preferences and personal tastes. I am not talking about the much-maligned greengrocers or those whose punctuation ability is poor because, for whatever reason, the education system has let them down. I am talking about people whom we would all accept to be well-educated, competent users of Standard English.

  No two educated people will agree about everything in the world of punctuation. The nineteenth-century pedant Henry Alford proudly claims in The Queen’s English (§ 124) that when he was editing a particular text he ‘destroyed more than a thousand commas, which prevented the text being properly understood’. The text he was referring to was written by someone as scholarly as he was. Indeed, disagreement can be found within one person, as the famous quotation from Oscar Wilde illustrates:

  I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.

  I have lost track of the number of occasions, while writing this book, that I have behaved in exactly the same way. Mark Twain sums it up well, writing in ‘The Contributors’ Club’, the final section of volume 45 of The Atlantic Monthly (1880):

  Some people were not born to punctuate; these cannot learn the art. They can learn only a rude fashion of it; they cannot attain to its niceties, for these must be felt; they cannot be reasoned out. Cast-iron rules will not answer, here, any way; what is one man’s comma is another man’s colon. One man can’t punctuate another manuscript any more than one person can make the gestures for another person’s speech.

  I disagree about the first part of this quotation: anyone can learn to punctuate well if taught well – which means understanding the nature of the linguistic system that underlies it, with all its foibles and exceptions. But I whole-heartedly agree with the second part (assuming he would allow me to add ‘or woman’ at appropriate places).

  The individuality of punctuation is something about which literary writers and grammarians agree. Even William Cobbett, in one of the most pedantic works to be written about English in the early nineteenth century, concurs. In Letter 14 of A Grammar of the English Language (1829), addressed to his son, he concludes his review of the topic with these words:

  You will now see, that it is quite impossible to give any precise rules for the use of these several points. Much must be left to taste: something must depend upon the weight which we may wish to give to particular words, or phrases; and something on the seriousness, or the levity, of the subject, on which we are writing.

  Perhaps that is why we care so much about punctuation: we are aware that its character is shifting and unpredictable, that it doesn’t offer the same level of order and correctness that is seen in spelling and grammar, and it disturbs us. We hope to find clear-cut rules and instead find tendencies, trends, and fashions. It seems a mess, so we turn to self-help guides which seem to offer a neat solution but find that they explain only a small part of the punctuation story.

  Punctuation has always been a matter of trends. Every chapter in this book shows that it is subject to changes in fashion. No one has ever been able to define a set of rules which will explain all uses of all punctuation marks. Practice varies so much between formal and informal writing, between Britain and America, between page and screen, between publisher and publisher, between author and author, between generation and generation, between men and women. The best we can do is identify norms, plot trends, emphasize the need for personal consistency, and be very cautious indeed about making generalizations. Hardly any rules of punctuation are followed by all of the people all of the time. The pragmatic approach respects this reality, and tries to come to terms with it.

  Being pragmatic doesn’t mean ‘anything goes’ – ignoring the rules that do exist. It means respecting all linguistic realities, whether rule-based or not. A corollary is that it also means we should not seek to impose unauthentic rules on the language – insisting, for example, that all cases of tall, dark(,) and handsome should / should not have a comma before and (p. 250). The teaching of unauthentic rules is actually one of the causes of illiteracy, because learners – encountering variation whereve
r they look, and given no management principles to relate the world they live in to the world of the classroom – can become confused, lose confidence, and end up making the very errors that the rules were intended to eliminate. Uncertainty over apostrophes in hers, its, ours, yours, and theirs is a classic case in point (p. 282). Having been taught that the apostrophe must be used before s when the word expresses possession, they happily generalize the principle to possessive pronouns, only to find that it no longer works (except with one’s). In which case, can the principle be trusted anywhere? The point is easily anticipated in class, of course, if the weakness in the system is appreciated by the teacher. If it isn’t, we lay the foundation for a new generation of punctuation pedants who one day – in cases such as the serial comma – will adopt what they think is a logical solution and insist on everyone else using it.

  The reassuring point is that punctuation is a system, despite the exceptions and the vagaries of taste. As described in Chapter 13, it is hierarchical in character and offers a fixed number of choices at each level. It is moreover a very small system, compared with grammar – a dozen or so common marks only. This is the point missed by Cobbett in his remark above: even though no two people agree all the time, they do agree some of the time, and it is these areas of agreement that identify the system and provide the basis for any course of study. I can’t put a figure on it: I don’t know what proportion of the punctuation system is subject to rule as opposed to taste. My feeling is that it is far less than we see in grammar and spelling. Taste affects about half the descriptive observations in this book. But at least the other half is capable of a rule-based account.

  Also reassuring is the observation that taste is not always idiosyncratic. A great deal of the variation noted throughout this book is to do with functions rather than forms. Punctuation is not simply a matter of choosing between, say, single or double inverted commas, or between a colon and a semicolon, but of understanding the role that it plays in promoting the effectiveness of a text. For a long time, as we saw in Chapter 7, people thought there were only two functions to punctuation: a guide to pronunciation and a guide to grammar. There are far more, as the descriptive chapters of this book illustrate. There is a ludic function, seen in poetry, informal letters, and many online settings where people are playing with punctuation. There is a psycholinguistic function, facilitating easy processing by writer and reader. There is a sociolinguistic function, contributing to rapport between users. There is a stylistic function, providing genres with some of their orthographic identity.

  The importance of genres needs to be appreciated, because they constrain the options available to the writer. Each written genre has its own orthographic style. Advertisements these days use little punctuation, relying on other graphic features to present their content. Certain kinds of legal texts traditionally avoid it altogether, reflecting a view that a case can stand or fall depending on the placement of a comma. Liturgical texts rely on it, especially when there needs to be unison speech from the congregation: if people are praying aloud together, and don’t know the prayers by heart, they need frequent and clear punctuation cues to ensure their rhythm and pausing is shared – as the Old English monks knew very well. In every genre, the role of punctuation is holistic: it is the overall look of a text, created partly by many individual punctuation choices, that provides its stylistic identity. And this effect can be observed in any written genre, offline or online – journalism, instructional writing, scientific reporting, text-messaging, blogging … Literature is no exception. Writers like James Joyce, E E Cummings, and Gertrude Stein do bend and break punctuation rules for artistic effect; but bending and breaking rules does not mean arbitrariness and inconsistency. We never see sentences like this:

  ;this” is an! exa)mple ?of an arbitr-ary: and,, inc’onsist.ent use of punc(tuation-

  There is order in linguistic art, even though it may require some effort to discover it, as we saw with the Cummings poem on p. 305.

  To conclude: I agree totally with the aim of the punctuation guides written by G V Carey, Eric Partridge, Lynne Truss, and others, which is to improve our understanding of punctuation and to bring its study into the centre of the educational stage. That is, after all, why I have written the present book. I am as disturbed as those authors were when I see nonstandard punctuation used in settings where we expect standard forms to prevail, as this can affect the user’s social credibility or career prospects. The whole point of a standard language is to ensure general intelligibility and acceptability by having everyone follow an agreed and respected set of norms of usage. One of the jobs of education is to teach the written standard, and punctuation is part of that. If students leave school not having learned to punctuate well, then something has gone horribly wrong. My hope is that this book will make this happen less often.

  Envoi: Gertrude Stein on punctuation

  There are some punctuations that are interesting and there are some punctuations that are not.

  I doubt whether anyone has attributed more personality to punctuation marks, or treated them with such loving-hate, as American writer Gertrude Stein. In a 1932 lecture on ‘Poetry and grammar’, published the following year in Lectures in America, she sounds off about punctuation in her characteristic repetitive playful stream-of-consciousness style. Her views are an extreme reaction to the traditional account of punctuation, and I end my book with one of them to illustrate the theme of my final chapter: that at the heart of punctuation there is an unavoidable tension between rules and taste, an intrinsic subjectivity, and a personal commitment that needs to be recognized if the subject is to be truly mastered.

  A question is a question, anybody can know that a question is a question and so why add to it the question mark when it is already there when the question is already there in the writing. Therefore I never could bring myself to use a question mark, I always found it positively revolting, and now very few do use it. Exclamation marks have the same difficulty and also quotation marks, they are unnecessary, they are ugly, they spoil the line of the writing or the printing and anyway what is the use, if you do not know that a question is a question what is the use of its being a question. …

  The question mark is alright when it is all alone when it is used as a brand on cattle or when it could be used in decoration but connected with writing it is completely entirely completely uninteresting.

  When it is all alone. As on a tavern sign. Which is where I came in.

  Appendix

  Teaching punctuation

  I see my job as a linguist to talk about the ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘why’ of language. Even the ‘who’ sometimes. I leave the ‘how (to teach)’ to the professionals. But ‘how’ inevitably depends on ‘what’, so I thought it would be useful to bring together the various observations about the teaching of punctuation suggested by the pragmatic approach at various points in this book.

  Never isolate punctuation

  Punctuation is one part – an important part, but not the only part – of the entire writing system (the orthography or graphology) of the language, and needs to be seen as part of that system and integrated within it. There are several points of overlap, as seen in Chapter 32, such as capitalization and typography. From a child’s point of view, it’s the whole graphic picture that is the starting point. Punctuation takes its place towards the bottom of a literacy hierarchy of book, page, illustration, and text.

  Orthography, in turn, is part of the language as a whole, so punctuation needs to be seen routinely in relation to other aspects of language structure and use – most obviously grammar, but also pronunciation (in the sense of oral fluency), vocabulary, discourse, and style. Semantics and pragmatics are the foundation topics here, as I’ve emphasized since Chapter 11, for it’s not possible to explain the complexity of punctuation without them. The semantic perspective explores the meanings that punctuation (chiefly through the mediation of grammar) is able to express. The pragmatic perspective explores th
e factors that cause variation and change. It’s essential to use both perspectives in teaching, for each explains only half of what is going on (Chapter 34).

  In relation to grammar, punctuation shouldn’t be thought of as some sort of appendage. This was the problem with traditional approaches, which relegated it to a chapter at the back of a book. Rather, as Percival Leigh put it in his Comic English Grammar (1840), ‘Punctuation is the soul of Grammar’. It’s always there, awaiting a call whenever a grammatical point needs to be taught in relation to writing. So it should be spread through a syllabus. For example, sentences, in their various functions (statement, question, etc) will motivate an exploration of ending options (Chapter 16). Subordinate clauses will motivate an exploration of how they are to be linked punctuationally to main clauses (Chapter 25). Important semantic contrasts will need to be explained in their place (such as when dealing with relative clauses, Chapter 25). Ambiguities (‘are you asking me or telling me?’) will need to be noted when encountered (Chapter 21). There are so many points of connection that their exploration needs to be spread in a leisurely way over time. Try to avoid the trap of ‘having a lesson on punctuation’, without some other motivation. That should never be the routine, for punctuation is never an end in itself. It’s always in the service of some other aspect of language.

  Detect the limitations