Fun Fact of the Week: Punctuation Part I

What a messed up language English is. Spelling, pronunciation, and the mountains of confusing vocabulary aside, what we’ll look at today is punctuation. From the period to the interrobang, the ancient to the modern, the family of punctuation marks have always been around to guide us, to confuse us, and even, occasionally, to thrill us!

Of course, it was Aristophanes– Greek playwright and master of being snooty and pretentious while simultaneously taking a big dump on the establishment–who began punctuation (probably; this is not a hill I’m willing to die on). Originally, it was to advise actors to take a large, medium, or short-length breath before their lines. The Romans thought this approach was for cowards, and just got confused when reading a text for the first time, like real men. Things began to get all uppity when the nerds began to read silently to themselves (what weirdos), and whole hordes of punctuation marks began to get introduced throughout the ages to help guide/force the reader through a body of text. 

Some grammatical entities have simple rules. Typically sentences, when you ignore their often complicated substructures, are easy to track. They begin and they end. Just like that. Or this. We all know the rule, capitalize the first letter of a sentence, and end it with a period. Interestingly, the first letter of a sentence began to be capitalized in the 13th century, although the scheme didn’t fully catch on until the 16th century. Periods, to the Americans, the full-stop, to the British, or the point, to Chaucer (he did get straight to the point) have been used fairly regularly since the 7th century, and again, are one of the simpler grammatical objects to use.

The flitty friend of the period, the comma, is seen as the foot soldier of the sentence. Perhaps you suffer from commaphilia, and your hum papers are littered with them in an effort to mime the romantic writers of yore. Without rhyme or reason, they lay strewn, destitute, forgotten, as the heart of the writer, ever greedy, seeks to dictate the passage of the reader’s eyes over the page. Or perhaps you are a commaphobe—one who detests their very usage. Fine. I suppose you’re entitled to your opinions. You would rather die than use more commas than necessary. Even if it ends up chopping up your paragraphs. Feels more like chunks of code than writing.  

Even though it might be controversial, I will come out and say it: I am an ardent supporter of the Oxford comma (or, serial comma). Ideally, I believe that the ‘Oxford comma’ as a concept should not exist, instead, it should just be called a comma. This estranged grammatical mutant should be integrated easily into writing and understood to be a natural part of grammar. The Oxford comma, for those who did better things with their lives than learn this, is when you place a comma between the penultimate and final items in a list. First an example of a sentence with an Oxford comma: 

I had a civil, completely reasonable discourse with my friends, Audrey Bilger, and Karnell McConnell-Black. 

Here, my friends, Audrey, and Karnell are all mutually exclusive entities– something which more closely reflects reality. 

However, if we remove the Oxford comma from this sentence, we get:

 I had a civil, completely reasonable discourse with my friends, Audrey Bilger and Karnell McConnell-Black. This could be interpreted as ‘. . . my friends, who are called Audrey and Karnell. . .’ which is not what I am trying to say here. 

 Some argue against the Oxford comma, saying it muddies the water in certain use cases—I have not yet been convinced. 

Things get a little more interesting with the apostrophe, which got its start in the 16th century in English. In Greek, apostrophe means ‘turning away,’ and highlights the apostrophe’s classical role as a contraction device. Do not want to spell each of your words? Then don’t! 

The apostrophe’s other tasks is to pick up the task of possessives as well. Its job is complicated, especially seeing how the ‘its’ I just used doesn’t have an apostrophe where it should. I guess ‘it is’ was contracted more frequently that ‘it’ had things to possess. The other tricky business is when the ‘it’ is plural, and all of the apostrophes’ homes are moved one letter over to the very end of the sentence.  Confusingly, the apostrophe also has a rare usage to indicate the plural of a word when the word is being semi-quoted in the sentence. The do’s and don'ts of this rule are tricky and it’s a little vibes-based on how things are applied. You got all that, right?

Although you mightn’t’ve noticed it in that sentence, the double apostrophized word is a rare but pretty find. Although it isn’t technically allowed by most proper grammarians, in my humble opinion the elusive double-contraction shouldn’t’ve been dismissed so easily back when the apostrophe began to be widespread, and wouldn’t’ve been if prescriptivism hadn’t been such a widely held belief in academia.

I’m also personally a fan of the apostrophe as an easy plug in for the sound of the glottal stop, as in the quicker Capp’in As opposed to the fully pronounced Captain. This often coincides with contractions, as in “G’day mate”. Speaking of, it also gets a role in mincing up various English-ish accents/dialects/languages (I won’t bother with the difference between those here) for easier reading, like Scottish ci’y (city), or Cockney Bu’er (butter). 

This well-punctuated Fun Fact of the Week will return after winter break. Prepare for the elite agents of the grammar family to appear: the colon, the stalwart statement piece; the semicolon, the dreaded pretentious entity; the punctuation pairs, including but not limited to the so-called “quotations,” parenthesis (they’re punctuation too), and question and exclamation marks (?!?); the slashes and/or dashes-- and (… pause for dramatic effect …) ellipses; and even the cryptids of the grammatical world-- the ampersand, Question Comma mark, and interobang.