Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [41]
Martin Amis, collected in
The War Against Cliché, 2001
What a rotten thing to do. But on the other hand, I feel he has saved us all the bother of reading the book now.
When Amis fils mentioned quotation marks as an annoyance in The Philosopher’s Pupil, he was not objecting to those that indicate actual quotations. Inverted commas (or speech marks, or quotes) are sometimes used by fastidious writers as a kind of linguistic rubber glove, distancing them from vulgar words or clichés they are too refined to use in the normal way. This “N” character in Iris Murdoch’s novel evidently can’t bring himself to say “keep in touch” without sealing it hygienically within inverted commas, and doubtless additionally indicating his irony with two pairs of curled fingers held up at either side of his face. In newspapers, similar inverted commas are sometimes known as “scare quotes”, as when a headline says “BRITAIN BUYS ‘WRONG’ VACCINE”, “ROBERT MAXWELL ‘DEAD’ ”, or “DEAD MAN ‘EATEN’ IN GRUESOME CAT HORROR”. Such inverted commas (usually single, rather than double) are understood by readers to mean that there is some authority for this story, perhaps even a quotable source, but that the newspaper itself won’t yet state it as fact. Evidently there is no legal protection provided by such weaselly inverted commas: if you assert someone is ‘LYING’, it’s pretty much the same in law as saying he is lying. And we all know the dead man was definitely eaten by those gruesome cats – otherwise no one would have raised the possibility. The interesting thing is how this practice relates to the advertising of ‘PIZZAS’ in quite large supermarket chains. To those of us accustomed to newspaper headlines, ‘PIZZAS’ in inverted commas suggests these might be pizzas, but nobody’s promising anything, and if they turn out to be cardboard with a bit of cheese on top, you can’t say you weren’t warned.
There is a huge amount of ignorance concerning the use of quotation marks. A catalogue will advertise that its pineapple ring slicer works just like ‘a compass’. Why? Why doesn’t it work just like a compass? There is a serious cognitive problem highlighted here, I think; a real misunderstanding of what writing is. Nigel Hall, a reader in literacy education at Manchester Metropolitan University who studies the way children learn to punctuate, told me about one small boy who peppered his work with quotation marks, regardless of whether it was reporting any speech. Why did he do that? “Because it’s all me talking,” the child explained, and I imagine it was hard to argue against such immaculate logic. It seems to me that the ‘PIZZAS’ people, who put signs in their windows – ‘NOW OPEN SUNDAYS’, ‘THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING’ – have the same problem as this little boy. If they are saying this thing, announcing it, then they feel that logically they have to present it in speech marks, because it’s all them talking.
Comfortable though we are with our modern usage, it has taken a long time to evolve, and will of course evolve further, so we mustn’t get complacent. Until the beginning of the 18th century, quotation marks were used in England only to call attention to sententious remarks. Then in 1714 someone had the idea of using them to denote direct speech, and by the time of the first edition of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones in 1749, inverted commas were used by printers both to contain the speech and to indicate in a general, left-hand marginal way that there was speech going on.
Here the Book dropt from her Hand, and a Shower of Tears ran down into her Bosom. In this Situation she had continued a Minute, when the Door opened, and in came Lord Fellamar. Sophia started from her Chair at his Entrance ; and his Lordship advancing forwards, and making a low Bow said, ‘ I am afraid, Miss Wes-
‘tern,