Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [36]
It should come as no surprise that writers take an interest in punctuation. I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, “I should have used fewer semicolons” – and although I have spent months fruitlessly trying to track down the chap responsible, I believe it none the less. If it turns out that no one actually did say this on their deathbed, I shall certainly save it up for my own.
What you have to remember about our punctuation system is that it is very limited. Writers jealous of their individual style are obliged to wring the utmost effect from a tiny range of marks – which explains why they get so desperate when their choices are challenged (or corrected) by copy-editors legislating according to a “house style”. You write the words “apple tree” and discover that house style is “apple-tree”. This hurts. The alteration seems simply perverse. And no one is immune. When Salman Rushdie’s story “Free Radio” (in his book East, West [1994]) was first published by Atlantic Monthly, I have heard that the magazine repunctuated its deliberately “logorrhoeic” narration without consulting him, presumably on the assumption that punctuation was something Rushdie was happy to leave to others, like the hoovering. Nicholson Baker, in an essay on the history of punctuation in his book The Size of Thoughts (1996), relates an emotional battle with his copy-editor over whether “pantyhose” (as written) should be altered to “panty hose”. Baker, incidentally, advocates the return of compound punctuation, such as commas with dashes (, –), semicolons with dashes (;–) and colons with dashes (: –); and in his book Room Temperature (1990), muses so poetically on the shape of the comma (“it recalled the pedals of grand pianos, mosquito larvae, paisleys, adult nostril openings, the spiralling decays of fundamental particles, the prows of gondolas . . . ”) that – well, you’ve never heard anything like it.
See how the sense changes with the punctuation in this example:
Tom locked himself in the shed. England lost to Argentina.
These two statements, as they stand, could be quite unrelated. They merely tell you two things have happened, in the past tense.
Tom locked himself in the shed; England lost to Argentina.
We can infer from the semicolon that these events occurred at the same time, although it is possible that Tom locked himself in the shed because he couldn’t bear to watch the match and therefore still doesn’t know the outcome. With the semicolon in place, Tom locking himself in the shed and England losing to Argentina sound like two things that really got on the nerves of someone else. “It was a terrible day, Mum: Tom locked himself in the shed; England lost to Argentina; the rabbit electrocuted itself by biting into the power cable of the washing machine.”
Tom locked himself in the shed: England lost to Argentina.
All is now clear. Tom locked himself in the shed because England lost to Argentina. And who can blame him, that’s what I say.
It is sad to think people are no longer learning how to use the colon and semicolon, not least because, in this supreme QWERTY keyboard era, the little finger of the human right hand, deprived of its traditional function, may eventually dwindle and drop off from disuse. But the main reason is that, as Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, “The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.” Perspicuity and beauty of composition are not to be sneezed at in this rotten world. If colons and semicolons give themselves airs and graces, at least they also confer airs and graces that the language would be lost without.
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Cutting a Dash
In 1885, Anton Chekhov wrote a Christmas short story called “The Exclamation