Eats, Shoots & Leaves (3 page)

Which was very impressive. Identifying “additional information” at the age of eight is quite an achievement, and I know for a fact that I couldn’t have done it. But if things are looking faintly more optimistic under the National Curriculum, there remains the awful truth that, for over a quarter of a century, punctuation and English grammar were simply not taught in the majority of schools, with the effect that A-level examiners annually bewailed the condition of examinees’ written English, while nothing was done. Candidates couldn’t even
spell
the words “grammar” and “sentence”, let alone use them in any well-informed way.

Attending a grammar school myself between 1966 and 1973, I don’t remember being taught punctuation, either. There was a comical moment in the fifth year when our English teacher demanded,
“But you
have
had lessons in grammar?” and we all looked shifty, as if the fault was ours. We had been taught Latin, French and German grammar; but English grammar was something we felt we were expected to infer from our reading – which is doubtless why I came a cropper over “its” and “it’s”. Like many uninstructed people, I surmised that, if there was a version of “its” with an apostrophe
before
the “s”, there was somehow logically bound to be a version of “its” with an apostrophe
after
the “s” as well. A shame no one set me right on this common misapprehension, really. But there you are. I just remember a period when, convinced that an apostrophe was definitely required
somewhere
, I would cunningly suspend a very small one immediately above the “s”, to cover all eventualities. Imagine my teenage wrath when, time after time, my homework was returned with this well-meant floating apostrophe struck out. “Why?” I would rail, using all my powers of schoolgirl inference and getting nowhere. Hadn’t I balanced it perfectly? How could the teacher possibly tell I had put it in the wrong place?

Luckily for me, I was exceptionally interested in English and got there in the end. While other girls
were out with boyfriends on Sunday afternoons, getting their necks disfigured by love bites, I was at home with the wireless listening to an Ian Messiter quiz called
Many a Slip
, in which erudite and amusing contestants spotted grammatical errors in pieces of prose. It was a fantastic programme. I dream sometimes they have brought it back. Panellists such as Isobel Barnett and David Nixon would interrupt Roy Plomley with a
buzz
and say “Tautology!” Around this same time, when other girls of my age were attending the Isle of Wight Festival and having abortions, I bought a copy of Eric Partridge’s
Usage and Abusage
and covered it in sticky-backed plastic so that it would last a lifetime (it has). Funny how I didn’t think any of this was peculiar at the time, when it was behaviour with “Proto Stickler” written all over it. But I do see now why it was no accident that I later wound up as a sub-editor with a literal blue pencil.

But to get back to those dark-side-of-the-moon years in British education when teachers upheld the view that grammar and spelling got in the way of self-expression, it is arguable that the timing of their grammatical apathy could not have been worse. In
the 1970s, no educationist would have predicted the explosion in universal written communication caused by the personal computer, the internet and the key-pad of the mobile phone. But now, look what’s happened: everyone’s a writer! Everyone is posting film reviews on Amazon that go like this:

I watched this film [
About a Boy
] a few days ago expecting the usual hugh Grant bumbling . . . character Ive come to loathe/expect over the years. I was thoroughly suprised. This film was great, one of the best films i have seen in a long time. The film focuses around one man who starts going to a single parents meeting, to meet women, one problem He doesnt have a child.

Isn’t this sad? People who have been taught nothing about their own language are (contrary to educational expectations) spending all their leisure hours attempting to string sentences together for the edification of others. And there is no editing on the internet! Meanwhile, in the world of text messages, ignorance of grammar and punctuation obviously doesn’t affect a person’s ability to communicate messages such as “C U later”. But if you try anything longer, it always seems to turn out much
like the writing of infant Pip in
Great Expectations
:

MI DEER JO I OPE U R KRWITE WELL I OPE I SHAL SON B HABELL 4 2 TEEDGE U JO AN THEN WE SHORL B SO GLODD AN WEN I M PRENGTD 2 U JO WOT LARX AN BLEVE ME INF XN PIP.

Now, there are many people who claim that they do fully punctuate text messages. For
Cutting a Dash
, we asked people in the street (outside the Palladium Theatre, as it happens, at about 5pm) if they used proper punctuation when sending text messages, and were surprised – not to say incredulous – when nine out of ten people said yes. Some of them said they used semicolons and parentheses and everything. “I’m a grammar geek,” explained one young New Zealand woman. “I’m trying to teach my teenage son to punctuate properly,” said a nice scholarly-looking man. I kept offering these respondents an easy way out: “It’s a real fag, going through that punctuation menu, though? I mean, it would be quite understandable if you couldn’t be bothered.” But we had evidently stumbled into Grammar Geek Alley, and there was nothing we could do. “Of course I punctuate my text messages,
I did A-level English,” one young man explained, with a look of scorn. Evidently an A level in English is a sacred trust, like something out of
The Lord of the Rings
. You must go forth with your A level and protect the English language with your bow of elfin gold.

But do you know what? I didn’t believe those people. Either they were weirdly self-selecting or they were simply lying for the microphone. Point out to the newsagent that “DEAD SONS PHOTOS MAY BE RELEASED” is not grammatically complete and he will hastily change the subject to the price of milk. Stand outside a Leicester Square cinema indicating – with a cut-out apostrophe on a stick – how the title
Two Weeks Notice
might be easily grammatically corrected (I did this), and not a soul will take your side or indeed have a clue what your problem is. And that’s sad. Taking our previous analogies for punctuation, what happens when it isn’t used? Well, if punctuation is the stitching of language, language comes apart, obviously, and all the buttons fall off. If punctuation provides the traffic signals, words bang into each other and everyone ends up in Minehead. If one can bear for a moment to think of punctuation
marks as those invisibly beneficent fairies (I’m sorry), our poor deprived language goes parched and pillowless to bed. And if you take the courtesy analogy, a sentence no longer holds the door open for you to walk in, but drops it in your face as you approach.

The reason it’s worth standing up for punctuation is not that it’s an arbitrary system of notation known only to an over-sensitive elite who have attacks of the vapours when they see it misapplied. The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without it there is no reliable way of communicating meaning. Punctuation herds words together, keeps others apart. Punctuation directs you how to read, in the way musical notation directs a musician how to play. As we shall see in the chapter on commas, it was first used by Greek dramatists two thousand years ago to guide actors between breathing points – thus leading to the modern explanation of why a cat is not a comma:

A cat has claws at the ends of its paws.

A comma’s a pause at the end of a clause.

Words strung together without punctuation
recall those murky murals Rolf Harris used to paint, where you kept tilting your head and wondering what it was. Then Rolf would dip a small brush into a pot of white and – to the deathless, teasing line, “Can you guess what it is yet?” – add a line here, a dot there, a curly bit, and suddenly all was clear. Good heavens, it looked like just a splodge of colours and all along it was a kangaroo in football boots having a sandwich! Similarly, take a bit of unpunctuated prose, add the dots and flourishes in the right place, stand back, and what have you got?

My dear Joe,

I hope you are quite well. I hope I shall soon be able to teach you, Joe – and then we shall be so glad. And when I am apprenticed to you, Joe:
what larks!
Believe me, in affection,

Pip

Every language expert from Dr Johnson onwards has accepted that it’s a mistake to attempt to “embalm the language”. Of course it must change and adapt.
When the time comes that Pip’s original text is equally readable with the one above, then our punctuation system can be declared dead and no one will mind. In the chapters that follow, we will see how it is in the nature of printers’ conventions (which is all punctuation marks are) to develop over time, usually in the cause of making language less fussy on the page. It is useful to remember, however – as we struggle to preserve a system under attack – that a reader from a couple of hundred years ago would be shocked by present-day punctuation that we now regard as flawless and elegant. Why don’t we use capital letters for all nouns any more? Why don’t we use full stops after everyday abbreviations? Why not combine colons with dashes sometimes? Where did all the commas go? Why isn’t there a hyphen in “today”? Lawks-a-mussy, what sort of punctuation chickens are we at the beginning of the 21st century?

Well, taking just the initial capital letters and the terminating full stop (the rest will come later), they have not always been there. The initial letter of a sentence was first capitalised in the 13th century, but the rule was not consistently applied until the 16th.
In manuscripts of the 4th to 7th centuries, the first letter of the page was decorated, regardless of whether it was the start of a sentence – and indeed, while we are on the subject of decorated letters, who can forget the scene in
Not the Nine O’Clock News
in which an elderly, exhausted monk unbent himself after years of illuminating the first page of the Bible, only to see that he had written, gloriously, “Benesis”? Nowadays, the convention for starting a new sentence with a capital letter is so ingrained that word-processing software will not allow you to type a full stop and then a lower case letter; it will capitalise automatically. This is bad news, obviously, for chaps like e.e. cummings, but good news for those who have spotted the inexorable advance of lower case into book titles, television captions, company names and (of course) everything on the non-case-sensitive internet, and lie awake at night worrying about the confusion this is spreading in young minds.

Meanwhile, the full stop is surely the simplest mark to understand – so long as everyone continues to have some idea what a sentence is, which is a condition that can’t be guaranteed. As the original
“point” (so called by Chaucer), it appears to occupy a place in our grammar that is unassailable. Every time the sentence ends, there is a full stop (or a full-stop substitute such as the exclamation mark or the question mark). As easy as that. If you resort to full stops all the time, by the way, and don’t use anything else, and keep to very short sentences, people who have read H. W. Fowler’s
The King’s English
(1906) will accuse you of “spot plague” and perhaps also assume you are modelling yourself on Ernest Hemingway, but the good news is you can’t go wrong grammatically. The American name “period”, incidentally, was one of its original English names too. Just as the word “comma” originally referred to the piece of writing itself (rather than the mark that contained it), so “period” referred to a longer piece of writing. Shakespeare called the full stop a period in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
when he described nervous players “making periods in the midst of sentences”. This was on the occasion of one of the first (and unfunniest) scenes of someone wrecking the sense of a speech by putting the full stops in the wrong place:

We do not come as minding to content you,

Our true intent is. All for your delight

We are not here.

William Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, Act V, scene i

Ho hum. But we should not be complacent even on behalf of the robust and unambiguous full stop. Young people call them dots, you know. They are now accustomed to following a full stop with a lower-case letter and
no space
. Ask them to write “seven-thirty” in figures (7.30) and they will probably either put a colon in it (because their American software uses a colon for 7:30) or write 7-30 or 7’30. Meanwhile, the illiterate default punctuation mark is nowadays the comma, which gives even more cause for alarm:

The tap water is safe to drink in tea and coffee, however, we recommend using bottled water for drinking, it can be purchased very cheaply in the nearby shops.

Sixty years ago, when he wrote
Mind the Stop
,
G. V. Carey gave just one paragraph to the apostrophe, because there was so little to say about it. “If only all marks were so easy,” he sighed. But this was in an age when people had been taught the difference between “Am I looking at my dinner or the dog’s?” and “Am I looking at my dinner or the dogs?” What I hope will become clear from this book is that one can usefully combine a descriptive and prescriptive approach to what is happening to this single aspect of the language. The descriptive sort of linguist tends to observe change in the language, note it, analyse it and manage not to wake up screaming every night. He will opine that if (say) the apostrophe is turning up in words such as “Books”, then that’s a sure sign nobody knows how to use it any more; that it has outlasted its usefulness; it is like Tinkerbell with her little light fading, sustained only by elicited applause; it will ultimately fade, extinguish and die. This is a highly sane and healthy point of view, of course – if a little emotionally cool. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, severely prescriptive grammarians would argue that, since they were taught at school in 1943 that you must never start a sentence with “And” or
“But”, the modern world is benighted by ignorance and folly, and most of modern literature should be burned.