Making a Point (32 page)

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sign; today more commonly used along with a name to show death or extinction, or along with a word to show that it is obsolete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?

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 wherever 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.