Eats, Shoots & Leaves (13 page)

On page 33 of the first-edition copy of Eric Partridge’s
You Have a Point There
that I have before me as I write (I borrowed it from the University of London Library), there is a marginal note made by a reader long ago. A marginal note? Yes, and I have been back to check and muse on it several times. Partridge, who is just about to elucidate the 17th application of the comma (“Commas in Fully Developed Complex Sentences”), is explaining that in this particular case it is difficult to formulate a set of rigid rules. “My aim is to be helpful, not dogmatic,” he explains. “The following examples will, if examined and pondered, supply the data from which any person of average intelligence can, without strain, assimilate an unformulated set of working rules.” At which the unknown, long-ago
reader has written in old-fashioned handwriting up the side, “Rot! You lazy swine Partridge.”

There are two reasons why I have borne this ballpoint outburst in mind while writing this book. One is that if
Eric Partridge
wasn’t comprehensive enough for some people, there is obviously naff-all chance for me. But there is also the fact that this startling effusion has lain within the pages of
You Have a Point There
possibly for fifty years, which is as long as the book itself has been a book. And this makes me wistful. The future of books is a large subject and perhaps this is not a suitable place to pursue it. We hear every day that the book is dead and that even the dimmest child can find “anything” on the internet. Yet I’m afraid I have to stick my small oar in because – as I hope has become clear from the foregoing chapters – our system of punctuation was produced in the age of printing, by printers, and is reliant on the ascendancy of printing to survive. Our punctuation exists as a printed set of conventions; it has evolved slowly because of printing’s innate conservatism; and is effective only if readers have been trained to appreciate the nuances of the printed page. The good news for punctuation is that the age
of printing has been glorious and has held sway for more than half a millennium. The bad news for punctuation, however, is that the age of printing is due to hold its official retirement party next Friday afternoon at half-past five.

“I blame all the emails and text messages,” people say, when you talk about the decline in punctuation standards. Well,
yes
. The effect on language of the electronic age is obvious to all, even though the process has only just begun, and its ultimate impact is as yet unimaginable.

“I write quite differently in emails,” people say, with a look of inspired and happy puzzlement – a look formerly associated only with starry-eyed returnees from alien abduction. “Yes, I write quite differently in emails, especially in the punctuation. I feel it’s OK to use dashes all the time, and exclamation marks. And those dot, dot, dot things!”

“Ellipsis,” I interject.

“I can’t seem to help it!” they continue. “It’s as if I’ve never heard of semicolons! Dot, dot, dot! And everyone’s doing the same!”

This is an exciting time for the written word: it is adapting to the ascendant medium, which happens
to be the most immediate, universal and democratic written medium that has ever existed. But it is all happening too quickly for some people, and we have to face some uncomfortable facts: for example, it is already too late to campaign for Heinz to add punctuation marks to the Alphabetti Spaghetti, in the hope that all will be well.

Having grown up as readers of the printed word (and possibly even scribblers in margins), we may take for granted the processes involved in the traditional activity of reading – so let us remind ourselves. The printed word is presented to us in a linear way, with syntax supreme in conveying the sense of the words in their order. We read privately, mentally listening to the writer’s voice and translating the writer’s thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it. Picking up the book in the first place entails an active pursuit of understanding. Holding the book, we are aware of posterity and continuity. Knowing that the printed word is always edited, typeset and proof-read before it reaches us, we appreciate its literary authority. Having paid money for it (often), we have a sense
of investment and a pride of ownership, not to mention a feeling of general virtue.

All these conditions for reading are overturned by the new technologies. Information is presented to us in a non-linear way, through an exponential series of lateral associations. The internet is a public “space” which you visit, and even inhabit; its product is inherently impersonal and disembodied. Scrolling documents is the opposite of reading: your eyes remain static, while the material flows past. Despite all the opportunities to “interact”, we read material from the internet (or CD-roms, or whatever) entirely passively because all the interesting associative thinking has already been done on our behalf. Electronic media are intrinsically ephemeral, are open to perpetual revision, and work quite strenuously against any sort of historical perception. The opposite of edited, the material on the internet is unmediated, except by the technology itself. And having no price, it has questionable value. Finally, you can’t write comments in the margin of your screen to be discovered by another reader fifty years down the line.

Having said all this, there is no immediate cause
for panic. If the book is dying, then at least it is treating its loyal fans (and the bookshops) to an extravagant and extended swan song. But when we look around us at the state of literacy – and in particular at all those signs for “BOBS’ MOTORS” and “ANTIQUE,S” – it just has to be borne in mind that books are no longer the main vehicles for language in modern society, and that if our fate is in the hands of the barbarians, there is an observable cultural drift that can only make matters worse. As I mentioned in this book’s introduction, by tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal under-educating in literacy has coincided with this unexpected explosion of global self-publishing. Thus people who don’t know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll. Mark Twain said it many years ago, but it has never been more true:

There is no such thing as “the Queen’s English”. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

Following the Equator
, 1897

It hurts, though. It hurts like hell. Even in the knowledge that our punctuation has arrived at its present state by a series of accidents; even in the knowledge that there are at least seventeen rules for the comma, some of which are beyond explanation by top grammarians – it is a matter for despair to see punctuation chucked out as worthless by people who don’t know the difference between
who’s
and
whose
, and whose bloody automatic “grammar checker” can’t tell the difference either. And despair was the initial impetus for this book. I saw a sign for “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it, and something deep inside me snapped; snapped with that melancholy sound you hear in Chekhov’s
The Cherry Orchard
, like a far-off cable breaking in a mine-shaft. I know that language moves on. It has to. Not once have I ever stopped to feel sorry for those Egyptian hieroglyph artists tossed on the scrapheap during a former linguistic transition (“Birds’ heads in profile, mate? You having a laugh?”). But I can’t help feeling that our punctuation system, which has served the written word
with grace and ingenuity for centuries, must not be allowed to disappear without a fight.

Nothing as scary as this has confronted punctuation before. True, Gertrude Stein banged on a bit. But attacks on punctuation have always been feeble. The Futurists of the early 20th century had a go, but without much lasting effect. In 1913, F. T. Marinetti wrote a manifesto he called
Destruction of Syntax/Imagination without Strings/Words-in-Freedom
which demanded the moral right of words to live unfettered – and only slightly undermined its case by requiring such a lot of punctuation in the title.

By the imagination without strings [wrote Marinetti] I mean the absolute freedom of images or analogies, or expressed with unhampered words and with no connecting strings of syntax and with no punctuation.

Marinetti wanted to explode the “so-called typographical harmony of the page” and he was influential both on poetry and on graphic design. Reading him now, however, one’s main impression is of a rather weedy visionary who fell asleep one night, saw in a dream how to use QuarkXPress, and was
then cruelly deposited back again in the days before the First World War.

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” or “M” for “Monsieur” – a full stop was essential. I doubt anyone bothers with that distinction any more. It is worth pointing out, though, that American usage has retained a lot of the formal niceties that we have dropped. They also often use a colon after “Dear Andrew”, while on this side of the Atlantic we dither about whether even a comma looks a bit fussy.