Eats, Shoots & Leaves - Lynne Truss [54]
Tropics, Zones and Meridian Lines?”
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
“They are merely conventional signs!”
Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark, 1876
But after journeying through the world of punctuation, and seeing what it can do, I am all the more convinced we should fight like tigers to preserve our punctuation, and we should start now. Who wants a blank map, for heaven’s sake? There is more at stake than the way people read and write. Note the way the Washington Post news story explained the benefits of emailing: it “increased employees’ productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less time to formulate their thoughts”. If we value the way we have been trained to think by centuries of absorbing the culture of the printed word, we must not allow the language to return to the chaotic scriptio continua swamp from which it so bravely crawled less than two thousand years ago. We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and allusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.
One of the best descriptions of punctuation comes in a book entitled The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist (1989) by Thomas McCormack. He says the purpose of punctuation is “to tango the reader into the pauses, inflections, continuities and connections that the spoken line would convey”:
Punctuation to the writer is like anatomy to the artist: He learns the rules so he can knowledgeably and controllédly depart from them as art requires. Punctuation is a means, and its end is: helping the reader to hear, to follow.
And here’s a funny thing. If all these high moral arguments have had no effect, just remember that ignorance of punctuation can have rather large practical repercussions in the real world. In February 2003 a Cambridge politics lecturer named Glen Rangwala received a copy of the British government’s most recent dossier on Iraq. He quickly recognised in it the wholesale copying of a twelve-year-old thesis by American doctoral student Ibrahim al-Marashi, “reproduced word for word, misplaced comma for misplaced comma”. Oh yes. Rangwala noticed there were some changes to the original, such as the word “terrorists” substituted for “opposition groups”, but otherwise much of it was identical. In publishing his findings, he wrote:
Even the typographical errors and anomalous uses of grammar are incorporated into the Downing Street document. For example, Marashi had written:
“Saddam appointed, Sabir ’Abd al-’Aziz al-Duri as head” . . .
Note the misplaced comma. The UK officials who used Marashi’s text hadn’t. Thus, on page 13, the British dossier incorporates the same misplaced comma:
“Saddam appointed, Sabir ’Abd al-’Aziz al-Duri as head” . . .
So we ignore the rules of punctuation at our political peril as well as to our moral detriment. When Sir Roger Casement was “hanged on a comma” all those years ago, who would have thought a British government would be rumbled on a comma (and a “yob’s comma”, at that) ninety years further down the line? Doesn’t it feel good to know this, though? It does. It really does.
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Bibliography
Robert Allen, Punctuation, Oxford University Press, 2002
Kingsley Amis, The King’s English: a guide to modern usage, HarperCollins, 1997
Anon, A Treatise of Stops, Points, or Pauses, and of notes which are used in Writing and Print, 1680
Tim Austin, The Times Guide to English Style and Usage, Times Books, 1999
Nicholson Baker, “The History of Punctuation”, in The Size of Thoughts, Chatto & Windus, 1996
— Room Temperature, Granta Books, 1990
Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: the fate of reading in an electronic age, Ballantine, 1994
Bill Bryson, Mother Tongue: the English language, Hamish