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By Root 192 0

Mark”. In this light parody of A Christmas Carol, a collegiate secretary named Perekladin has a sleepless night on Christmas Eve after someone at a party offends him – by casting aspersions on his ability to punctuate in an educated way. I know this doesn’t sound too promising, but stick with it, it’s Chekhov, and the general rule is that you can’t go wrong with Chekhov. At this party, the rattled Perekladin insists that, despite his lack of a university education, forty years’ practice has taught him how to use punctuation, thank you very much. But that night, after he goes to bed, he is troubled; and then he is haunted. Scrooge-like, he is visited on this momentous Christmas Eve by a succession of spectres, which teach him a lesson he will never forget.

And what are these spectres? They are all punctuation marks. Yes, this really is a story about punctuation – and first to disturb Perekladin’s sleep is a crowd of fiery, flying commas, which Perekladin banishes by repeating the rules he knows for using them. Then come full stops; colons and semicolons; question marks. Again, he keeps his head and sends them away. But then a question mark unbends itself, straightens up – and Perekladin realises he is stumped. In forty years he has had no reason to use an exclamation mark! He has no idea what it is for. The inference for the reader is clear: nothing of any emotional significance has ever happened to Perekladin. Nothing relating, in any case, to the “delight, indignation, joy, rage and other feelings” an exclamation mark is in the business of denoting.

As epiphanies go, this isn’t quite the same as seeing Tiny Tim’s ownerless crutch propped in the inglenook, but Perekladin is affected none the less.

The poor pen-pusher felt cold and ill at ease, as if he had caught typhus. The exclamation mark was no longer standing behind his closed eyes but in front of him, in the room, by his wife’s dressing-table, and it was winking at him mockingly.

Translation: Harvey Pitcher in Chekhov,

The Comic Stories, 1998

What can poor Perekladin do? When he hails a cab on Christmas Day, he spots immediately that the driver is an exclamation mark. Things are getting out of hand. At the home of his “chief”, the doorman is another exclamation mark. It is time to take a stand – and, signing himself into the visitors’ book at his chief’s house, Perekladin suddenly sees the way. Defiantly he writes his name, “Collegiate Secretary Yefim Perekladin” and adds three exclamation marks, “!!!”

And as he wrote those three marks, he felt delight and indignation, he was joyful and he seethed with rage.

“Take that, take that!” he muttered, pressing down hard on the pen.

And the phantom exclamation mark disappears.

Most of us can’t remember a time before we learned to punctuate. We perhaps remember learning to read and to spell, but not the moment when we found out that adding the symbol “!” to a sentence somehow changed the tone of voice it was read in. Luckily we are taught such stuff when we are young enough not to ask awkward questions, because the way this symbol “!” turns “I can’t believe it” into “I can’t believe it!” is the sort of dizzying convention that requires to be taken absolutely on trust. Of my own exclamation-mark history (which is not one to be proud of) all I can clearly recollect of its early days is that the standard keyboard of a manual typewriter in the 1970s – on which I did my first typing – did not offer an exclamation mark. You had to type a full stop, then back-space and type an apostrophe on top of it. Quite a deterrent to expressive punctuation, Mister Remington. But in fact, of course, all one’s resourceful back-space/shift-key efforts only added to the satisfaction of seeing the emphatic little black blighter sitting cheerfully on the page.

This chapter is about expressive, attention-seeking punctuation – punctuation that cuts a dash; punctuation that can’t help saying it with knobs on, such as the exclamation mark, the dash, the italic. Of course the effect of such marks can be over-relied on; of course they are condemned