G.B.
Shaw ignored apostrophes, quipping that he had ‘never been prosecuted’ for his
crime.
Wall Street Journal | 15 October 2015
Picture the scene: An Anglo-Saxon monk is hunched over his desk, copying a
manuscript character by painstaking character. It’s a tedious, unrelenting task
to decipher the unspaced, uncapitalized, underpunctuated text, made worse by
the fact that the Latin before him is little better than an archaic,
half-remembered second language. He mumbles aloud to extract the syllables and
words, as readers have done for the past thousand years, and copies out as much
as he can remember before moving on to the next phrase. The occasional gaps in
his new manuscript—nascent word spaces—measure the precise capacity of his
short-term memory.
This is where the
first section of “Making a Point,” David Crystal’s engaging history of punctuation, picks up,
sprinting from eighth-century Britain to the modern world in less than 100
pages. There is more to the birth of punctuation, certainly, than monks and
manuscripts—the Greeks had first marked pauses with tiny, inky dots more than a
thousand years earlier—but Mr. Crystal treats his chosen period with enthusiasm
and insight.
MAKING A POINT
By David Crystal
St.
Martin’s, 378 pages, $24.99
To go back to Mr.
Crystal’s beginning, then: Europe’s scribes could not bear to leave their newly
minted word spaces empty. They took the handful of ancient Greek dots and
developed them into a repertoire of new marks. The punctus
versus (a mark shaped like
the semicolon but used like the period) and the punctus
elevatus (an inverted semicolon
that functioned like its right-side-up counterpart) arrived in the eighth
century, and the punctus interrogativus, or question mark, in the 11th, to be joined in turn by slashes
(/), paragraph marks (¶), brackets and parentheses. But more significant than
this explosion in symbols, Mr. Crystal writes, was the change in how they were
used.
Through Anglo-Saxon
times, punctuation worked as a kind of oratorical stage direction. For the most
part, marks were added by readers, not writers, to help them perform texts
aloud: A dot or slash was a short pause; a punctus elevatus a longer one; and a
punctus interrogativus indicated a questioning tone of voice. The nuance
afforded by an ever-growing set of marks, however, led writers to add
punctuation themselves for fear they might be misunderstood—or even, in the
case of Christian writers, accused of heresy. This is where punctuation’s great
divide opened up. For some, punctuation was all about pauses, tone and vocal
performance, while for others it was the scaffolding on which they supported
the meaning of their words.
The arrival of the printing
press spurred another great expansion in punctuation. The comma, apostrophe,
colon, period and hyphen all appeared within 100 years of theGutenberg Bible, and the semicolon, exclamation mark and
quotation mark were not long to follow. The semicolon was the breakout star of
the bunch, forming part of a classic quartet: Readers were taught to think of a
comma as one beat, a colon as two, a semicolon as four and a period as a
scarcely believable eight beats. Try it, I dare you; this sentence will hang in
the air forever before the next one starts.
Worse was yet to come.
By the 18th century, militant grammarians were determined to truss punctuation
in a straitjacket of imagined rules. In the event, however, even basic marks
such as the period defied analysis. What was it that made a sentence?
grammarians asked. The presence of a verb? A logically complete thought? They
argued and hedged and ultimately failed to agree on anything as simple as the
mark’s name, as Mr. Crystal relates: “Is [.] a stop, a full stop, a point, a
full point, a period? Ben Jonson called it a prick. I have some sympathy.”
Opposing the grammarians were those writers and speakers who doggedly stuck to
punctuation as a rhetorical device. There were rules to be followed, certainly,
but a glance at “Moby-Dick” or “Pride and Prejudice” reveals a world in which a
comma was as much a suggestion as a requirement. The curious thing, as we reach
the modern era of emails and text messages, is that this is still very much the
case: The art of punctuation is suspended uneasily between rule-makers and
rule-breakers, and neither side seems ready to give up the fight.
Having brought us to
the present impasse in excellent style, Mr. Crystal changes tack abruptly with
a series of chapters organized along the lines of a conventional style manual
in which he addresses each major mark in turn. It is a jarring transition, but
he reveals himself to be a superbly pragmatic teacher. Learn the rules, he
says, but be prepared to break them when the moment calls for it. Punctuate for
meaning when your head tells you it is necessary and for aesthetics when your
soul demands it.
For example: Use the
serial comma if you like but not at the expense of clarity. Unsure of when to
use an apostrophe? Console yourself with the fact that G.B. Shaw ignored it for years, noting in 1902 that he had “not yet been
prosecuted” for his crime. On semicolons, Mr. Crystal quotes Kurt Vonnegut: “Do not use semicolons. They
are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is
show you’ve been to college.” Vonnegut, of course, breaks his own rule in short
order, explaining that “rules only take you so far, even good rules.” It might
be Mr. Crystal’s own motto.
As he closes his
account, Mr. Crystal is refreshingly upbeat about the Internet’s role in
linguistic change. Rather than bemoan the seeming flood of careless online
writing, he points out that domain names hark back to the earliest days of
unspaced text and that the constraints of Twitter and text messages render
punctuation expensive, even unnecessary. Technology is making laconic Cormac
McCarthys of us all, 140 characters at a time.
—Mr. Houston is the author of “Shady
Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical
Marks.”
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