Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [40]
It is evident that if you ask a question you ask a question but anybody who can read at all knows when a question is a question [. . .] I never could bring myself to use a question mark, I always found it positively revolting, and now very few do use it.
Since Stein wrote these remarks in 1935, it’s interesting that she thought the question mark was on the way out, even then. Those of us brought up with the question-mark ethic are actually horrified when a direct question is written without a question mark – as in, for example, the film title Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Unmarked questions left dangling in this way make me feel like an old-fashioned headmaster waiting for a child to remember his manners. “And?” I keep wanting to say. “And?” “Can you spare any old records,” it still says in that charity-shop window – only now it’s a printed sign, not a handwritten one. Every time I pass it, it drives me nuts. Meanwhile, as Kingsley Amis points out in his The King’s English, many people start sentences with words such as, “May I crave the hospitality of your columns” and then get so involved in a long sentence that they forget it started as a question, so finish it with a full stop.
To do so not only sends the interested reader, if there is one, back to the start to check that the fellow did at any rate start to ask a direct question, it also carries the disagreeable and perhaps truthful suggestion that the writer thinks a request from the likes of him is probably a needless politeness to the likes of the editor.
What a marvellous little aside, by the way: “if there is one”.
Of all the conventions of print that make no objective sense, the use of italics is the one that puzzles most. How does it work? Yet ever since italic type was invented in the 15th century, it has been customary to mix italic with roman to lift certain words out of the surrounding context and mark them as special. None of the marks in this chapter so far has anything to do with grammar, really. They are all to do with symbolically notating the music of the spoken language: of asking the question “?” and receiving the answer “!” Italics have developed to serve certain purposes for us that we never stop to question. When was the last time you panicked in the face of italics, “Hang on, this writing’s gone all wobbly”? Instead we all know that italics are the print equivalent of underlining, and that they are used for:
1 titles of books, newspapers, albums, films such as (unfortunately) Who Framed Roger Rabbit
2 emphasis of certain words
3 foreign words and phrases
4 examples when writing about language
We even accept the mad white-on-black convention that when a whole sentence is in italics, you use roman type to emphasise a key word inside it. Some British newspapers, notably The Guardian, have dropped the use of italics for titles, which as far as I can see makes life a lot more difficult for the reader without any compensating benefits. Like the exclamation mark, however, italics should be used sparingly for the purposes of emphasis – partly because they are a confession of stylistic failure, and partly because readers glancing at a page of type might unconsciously clock the italicised bit before starting their proper work of beginning in the top left-hand corner. Martin Amis, reviewing Iris Murdoch’s novel The Philosopher’s Pupil in The Observer in 1983, complained of a narrator, “N”, who was irritating on a variety of scores, and explains what can happen to a writer who uses italics too much:
Apart from a weakness for quotation marks, “N” also has a weakness for ellipses, dashes, exclamations and italics, especially italics. Each page is corrugated by half a dozen underlinings, normally a sure sign of stylistic irresolution. A jangled, surreal (and much shorter) version of the book could be obtained by reading the italic type and omitting the roman. It would go something like this:
deep, significant, awful, horrid, sickening,