Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [39]
How anybody can compose a story by word of mouth face to face with a bored-looking secretary with a notebook is more than I can imagine. Yet many authors think nothing of saying, “Ready, Miss Spelvin? Take dictation. Quote No comma Sir Jasper Murgatroyd comma close quotes comma said no better make it hissed Evangeline comma quote I would not marry you if you were the last man on earth period close quotes Quote Well comma I’m not comma so the point does not arise comma close quotes replied Sir Jasper twirling his moustache cynically period And so the long day wore on period. End of chapter.”
If I had to do that sort of thing I should be feeling all the time that the girl was saying to herself as she took it down, “Well comma this beats me period How comma with homes for the feebleminded touting for custom on every side comma has a man like this succeeded in remaining at large mark of interrogation.”
Question marks are used when the question is direct:
What is the capital of Belgium?
Have you been there?
Did you find the people very strange?
When the question is inside quotation marks, again it is required:
“Did you try the moules and chips?” he asked.
But when the question is indirect, the sentence manages without it:
What was the point of all this sudden interest in Brussels, he wondered.
I asked if she had something in particular against the Belgian national character.
Increasingly people are (ignorantly) adding question marks to sentences containing indirect questions, which is a bit depressing, but the reason is not hard to find: blame the famous upward inflection caught by all teenage viewers of Neighbours in the past twenty years. Previously, people said “you know?” and “know what I’m saying?” at the end of every sentence. Now they don’t bother with the words and just use the question marks, to save time. Everything ends up becoming a question? I’m talking about statements? It’s getting quite annoying? But at least it keeps the question mark alive so it can’t be all bad?
Deciding which way round to print the question mark wasn’t as straightforward as you might think, incidentally. In its traditional orientation, with the curve to the right, it appears to cup an ear towards the preceding prose, which seems natural enough, though perhaps only because that’s how we are used to seeing it. But people have always played around with it. In the 16th century the printer Henry Denham had the sophisticated idea of reversing the mark when indicating a rhetorical question (to differentiate it from a direct question), but it didn’t catch on. You can imagine other printers muttering uncertainly, “Rhetorical question? What’s a rhetorical question? Is this a rhetorical question?” – and not being able to answer. The Spanish Academy, however, in 1754 ratified the rather marvellous and flamboyant idea of complementing terminal question marks and exclamation marks with upside-down versions at the beginnings, thus:
¡Lord, love a duck!
¿Doesn’t Spanish look different from everything else now we’ve done this?
And it’s not a bad system at all. Evidently Bill Gates has personally assured the Spanish Academy that he will never allow the upside-down question mark to disappear from Microsoft word-processing programs, which must be reassuring for millions of Spanish-speaking people, though just a piddling afterthought as far as he’s concerned. Meanwhile, in Hebrew the question mark is exactly the same as our own, despite the fact that it ought logically to be flipped into reverse, since the words run from right to left. Remember Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady: “The Arabs learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning / The Hebrews learn it backwards, which is absolutely frightening”? So we have an interesting and perverse perceptual problem in Hebrew: with the question mark the same way round as our own, it looks back to front.
Unsurprisingly, Gertrude Stein was not a fan of the question mark. Are you beginning to suspect – as I am – that there was something wrong