Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [53]
“Yes, you can see the bullet points here, here and here, sir; there are multiple back-slashes, of course. And that’s a forward slash. I would have to call this a frenzied attack. Did anyone hear the interrobang?”
“Oh yes. Woman next door was temporarily deafened by it. What’s this?”
“Ah. You don’t see many of these any more. It’s an emoticon. Hold your head this way and it appears to be winking.”
“Good God! You mean – ?”
“That’s the mouth.”
“You mean – ?”
“That’s the nose.”
“Good grief. Then it’s – ?”
“Oh yes, sir. There’s no doubt about it, sir. The Punctuation Murderer has struck again.”
Is it an option to cling on to the punctuation and grammar we know and love? Hope occasionally flares up and dies down again. In May 1999, Bob Hirschfield wrote a news story in The Washington Post about a computer virus “far more insidious than the recent Chernobyl menace” that was spreading throughout the internet. What did this virus do? Named the Strunkenwhite Virus (after The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White, a classic American style guide), it refused to deliver emails containing grammatical mistakes. Could it be true? Was the world to be saved at a stroke (or even, if we must, at a forward slash)? Sadly, no. The story was a wind-up. Hirschfield’s intention in inventing the Strunkenwhite Virus for the delight of his readers was simply to satirise the public’s appetite for wildly improbable virus scare stories. In the process, however, he painted such a heavenly vision of future grammatical happiness that he inadvertently broke the hearts of sticklers everywhere:
The virus is causing something akin to panic throughout corporate America, which has become used to the typos, misspellings, missing words and mangled syntax so acceptable in cyberspace. The CEO of LoseItAll.com, an Internet startup, said the virus had rendered him helpless. “Each time I tried to send one particular e-mail this morning, I got back this error message: ‘Your dependent clause preceding your independent clause must be set off by commas, but one must not precede the conjunction.’ I threw my laptop across the room.”
. . . If Strunkenwhite makes e-mailing impossible, it could mean the end to a communication revolution once hailed as a significant timesaver. A study of 1,254 office workers in Leonia, N.J., found that e-mail increased employees’ productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less time to formulate their thoughts. (The same study also found that they lost 2.2 hours of productivity because they were e-mailing so many jokes to their spouses, parents and stockbrokers.)
. . . “This is one of the most complex and invasive examples of computer code we have ever encountered. We just can’t imagine what kind of devious mind would want to tamper with e-mails to create this burden on communications,” said an FBI agent who insisted on speaking via the telephone out of concern that trying to e-mail his comments could leave him tied up for hours.
Hirschfield’s story ended with the saddest invention of all:
Meanwhile bookstores and online booksellers reported a surge in orders for Strunk & White’s “The Elements of Style.”
Given all that we know about the huge changes operating on our language at the moment – and given all that we know about the shortcomings of the punctuation system produced by the age of printing – should we be bothering to fight for the 17 uses of the comma, or the appositive colon? Isn’t it the case, in the end, that punctuation is just a set of conventions, and that conventions have no intrinsic worth? One can’t help remembering the moment in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark when the Bellman exhibits his blank map and asks the crew how they feel about it:
“What