Timing Flies
The Wall Street Journal, of all unlikely organs, ran a recent piece on punctuation. You’d think the plus and minus sign would cover all their needs, but not a bit of it. Henry Hitchings, who has just written a book called The Language Wars: A History of Proper English, wades in on the horrors of such clangers as Rest Room’s or Puppy’s For Sale.
My own favourite example is Time flies you can’t they fly too fast. Does this mean you can’t fly while some other, speedier beings can? Well, no. Punctuated, it’s about little insects. Time flies? You can’t – they fly too fast. But then, punctuation is all about timing. It exists in the spoken word as the pauses and vocal up-and-downs that are never noticed. Take a simple word like Yes. Spoken neutrally, it can go with a nod as straight agreement or a question answered. But speak it with a rise in the voice and you have a slightly rude query, as from an impatient lifter of the phone. Yes? Put Oh in front of it and it becomes deeply cynical. Oh, yes? We use these verbal nuances all the time, but we’re losing the trick of how to write them down.
Publishers first started to invent these handy little marks in around the 16th century, when early printed books needed to reproduce the timing that conveyed such a lot in the spoken word. Until around 1520, they used what we now call a slash to indicate a brief pause, then it shortened down to our present day comma. Henry Hitchings details other early marks such as a horizontal ivy leaf called by its Latin name of hedera, which sounds a bit too painstaking for modern use. You never know, though. Now that we can bung emoticons on our communications at a mouse-touch, there could be a great blossoming of new or retrieved punctuation. Think, for instance, of the delightfully named ‘snark’, which was a back-to-front question mark deployed to show the writer was being ironic. One wonders if Lewis Carroll knew about this when he wrote his long, irreverent poem called The Hunting of the Snark.
Currently, punctuation is rapidly dying. The main reason, I think, is that we no longer ‘listen’ to written speech. It hurtles to and fro on the screen and though quickly understood it is seldom read with the deeper attention that unfolds its real meaning (if, in fact, meaning was articulated in the first place.) That’s why e-mails are so prone to misunderstanding. The nuance of what is implied doesn’t always decode to the person receiving it. Texts whizz from writer to reader but are seldom ‘heard’ in the way that a poem may sound in the head if read at the comparatively slow speed of speech. We have a shorthand way of interpreting what’s meant, rather as we did back in the days of unpunctuated telegrams, charged by the word. The subtleties of literary timing are giving way to what Mr Hitchings describes as ‘the jagged urgency’ of present-day conversation. We can’t be bothered with the measured gravity of the semicolon. We use dashes instead, as a quick alternative. I must admit, I rather like them, as they impose a small break that can’t be ignored. The dash had a frowned-on start, but it plonked its common boot into the aesthetic literary world when Emily Dickinson wrote her poems with dashes to separate thoughts and lines.
Hyphens in particular seem doomed. This is largely due to the Windows tendency to red-underline them, but they’ve been ruthlessly slaughtered by graphic designers who, as Hitchings points out, favour ‘an uncluttered aesthetic’. These high-handed artisans are probably also to blame for the reckless discarding of that little sign that is so vital to written English, the apostrophe.
What’s never been understood is that the apostrophe is not just punctuation but part of the grammar of the English language. It represents the genitive case, denoting possession. French doesn’t have a genitive case – hence la plume de ma tante. The concept of my aunt’s pen doesn’t exist. Languages that do have genitive, such as Latin and Russian, use a change of ending in any noun that owns something else. Mensa means table, but if we were talking of something owned by the table, such as a leg or cloth or varnish, it would be mensam. But English just uses the letter s, with an apostrophe. The table’s leg, cloth or what have you. The apostrophe is vital, because s also shows that things are plural. Hence the common confusion. My aunts have hats means several aunts, and their ownership of hats is picked up by the verb, have. My aunt’s hats means one aunt, owning several hats.
But – and it’s a big but – we also use the apostrophe to show a missing letter, as I have just done in writing it’s. I’ve missed out i from it is. If I hadn’t (short for had not) put the apostrophe in, its would be genitive, showing something belongs to it. That’s why you only put the apostrophe in when its is short for it is. OK? Countless announcements and even blurbs on book jackets get this wrong. Shocking, really.
Whoops. Found myself on the soap box again. But cheers for the Wall Street Journal. It’s a great day to see a financial paper using its clout to promote expressive clarity.
