Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [50]
On the same page, therefore, we will use three or four colours of ink, or even twenty different typefaces if necessary. For example: italics for a series of swift sensations, boldface for violent onomatopoeias, and so on. With this typographical revolution and this multicoloured variety in the letters I mean to redouble the expressive force of words.
So much for Marinetti, then. Meanwhile, George Bernard Shaw, along with his famous doomed campaign to reform the spelling of the English language, had already started making efforts to undermine the contractive apostrophe. And while he certainly had more global influence than Marinetti did, he remained a one-man campaign. It is a measure of Shaw’s considerable monomania, by the way, that in 1945 he wrote to The Times on the issue of the recently deployed atomic bomb to point out that since the second “b” in the word bomb was needless (I’m not joking), enormous numbers of working hours were being lost to the world through the practice of conforming to traditional spelling.
I can scribble the word “bomb” barely legibly 18 times in one minute and “bom” 24 times, saving 25 per cent per minute by dropping the superfluous b. In the British Commonwealth, on which the sun never sets, and in the United States of North America, there are always millions of people continually writing, writing, writing . . . Those who are writing are losing time at the rate of 131,400 × x per annum . . .
Abraham Tauber (ed.),
George Bernard Shaw on Language, 1965
Yes, GBS can be a pretty stark reminder of how far one may lose one’s sense of proportion when obsessed by matters of language.
But on the other hand he still writes better about language than most people, and in The Author in April 1902 he set out his “Notes on the Clarendon Press Rules for Compositors and Readers”, which included not only a brilliant attack on those “uncouth bacilli” (apostrophes) which appear so unnecessarily in words such as “dont” and “shant”, but was rather wonderful on italics too, and is perhaps where The Guardian got its ideas from:
Not only should titles not be printed in italic; but the customary ugly and unnecessary inverted commas should be abolished. Let me give a specimen. 1. I was reading The Merchant of Venice. 2. I was reading “The Merchant of Venice.” 3. I was reading The Merchant of Venice. The man who cannot see that No. 1 is the best looking as well as the sufficient and sensible form, should print or write nothing but advertisements for lost dogs or ironmongers’ catalogues: literature is not for him to meddle with.
Note the way Shaw (or his editor) puts the full stop inside the inverted commas in example two, by the way. While individual obsessives seem to have made little impact on the development of punctuation in the 20th century (Shaw had few followers, and nobody remembers the Futurists), it is quite clear that punctuation did develop quite robustly under other kinds of cultural pressure. Hyphenation practice has changed hugely in the past hundred years; also capitalisation, and the presentation of all forms of address. Nowadays we write:
Andrew Franklin
Profile Books
58A Hatton Garden
London EC1N 8LX
Or, let’s face it, I write that because he’s my publisher. But my point is: there is no punctuation in this at all, whereas just twenty years ago I would have written:
Mr. A. Franklin, Esq.,
Profile Books, Ltd.,
58A, Hatton Garden,
London, E.C.1
Those of us who were taught to place full stops after abbreviations have simply adapted to a world in which they are not required. I don’t write pub. or ’bus, but I’m quite sure I used to. When I trained as a journalist twenty-five years ago, the intermediate rule on matters of address was that if the contraction of a title still ended with the original final letter – thus “Mr” for “Mister”, or “Fr” for “Father” – no full stop was required, whereas if the title was cut short – “Prof” for “Professor