Fun Fact of the (Bi)Week: Punctuation Part II

The stop point out, with truth, the time of pause

A sentence doth require at ev’ry clause.

At ev’ry comma, stop while one you count;

At semicolon, two is the amount; 

A colon doth require the time of three;

The period four, as learned men agree.

• –Cecil Hartley, Principles of Punctuation: or, The Art of Pointing* (1818)

*Full Title: “Principles of Punctuation, Or, The Art of Pointing Familiarized, and Illustrated by Passages from the Best Writers: With an Explanation of All the Marks Or Characters Made Use of in English Writings; the Proper Use of Capital Letters; a Copious List, with the Meaning, of Those Initials Or Abbreviations of Latin and Other Words, of which Many are Not Generally Understood by the English Reader; and an Explanation of All the Technical Terms, &c. Relative to Books”

The semicolon. On this topic, Kurt Vonnegut said, “All they do is show you’ve been to college.” But how many of you actually know how to use a semicolon? Have you even attended Reed if you don’t use a semicolon unnecessarily in a HUMpaper at least once? 

Usage of the semicolon (occasionally hyphenated as semi-colon) is fraught with difficulty and value judgments on the part of the writer; there is no proper or universally agreed upon way to do it. Vibes-wise, the semicolon denotes a pause shorter than a period, but longer than a comma (as the poem above so eloquently states). More rigorously, the semicolon acts as an optional link between two independent clauses, but typically, they’re just thrown in for seasoning and spice. Due to how unnecessary the semicolon often seems, there is a vehement opposition to this punctuation mark. 

Semicolon opposition broadly falls into three categories with major overlap: people who believe they are too complicated, people who believe they are too optional, and the people who believe they are too pretentious. Typically, the three main bodies of semicolon opponents agree that proper usage of the semicolon is too unknown in the general populace, and frankly, among people who should know how to use one, to the point where they begin to question whether the semicolon should even exist. 

There are also the poor souls who have descended into semi-colon addiction, who freely overuse and abuse these delicate instruments to an absurd degree (looking at y’all Melville, Woolf, and Wyss). I myself struggled with this condition for a short time in high school, but have since made a recovery to only a slightly pretentious level of usage.

On the other hand, the full colon isn’t fussy: a dramatic conclusion to a sentence always follows. They also work to introduce quotations, examples, etc (“but please no more than once per paragraph” – my HUMprof). Nice and simple. The only other note is that they also were the foundation of emoticons :) 

Speaking of emotion: the exclamation mark! What a character. Boisterous as ever, and nasty to use in serious prose (or even poetry, for that matter), the exclamation mark indicates a level of excitement, surprise, or volume which accompanies a sentence. The only tricky part is that it can sometimes be difficult to see one coming, particularly if the sentence doesn’t seem like it should have one! To rectify this, in 1745 the Spanish Academy officialized the practice of placing an upside down question or exclamation mark before the beginning of a sentence. I’m sure this was done much to the adoration of Spanish teachers around the globe who now had a way to give a boring slideshow a Spanish flair other than the ñ or various accent marks. 

Not quite as in-your-face, the question mark is a little more approachable due to how necessary it is in most writing. Rhetorically, or simply mysteriously, questions are a fundamental part of the writing process (at least, to any good student of Socrates). More so than this, I just think they’re fun. It can make things feel a little more personal between the writer and reader, you know? 

With regards to other fundamental aspects of writing, quotation marks are simple until you have quote-ception (and we’re not even going to get into citation rules). Typically, quotations within quotations are reduced to being held within single apostrophes, however layering beyond that is more or less the Wild West of grammar. For example: 

We begin with, “[I am] an unabashed admirer of the Oxford Comma.” – Audrey Bilger.

 Nice and easy. But let’s suppose that you communicate this titillating news to a friend saying: 

“It’s quite surprising that Audrey Bilger is ‘an unabashed admirer of the Oxford Comma.’” Then, hypothetically, I tell myself the following:

“I can’t believe they said ‘It’s quite surprising that Audrey Bilger is “an unabashed admirer of the Oxford Comma.”’”

This sentence suffers from Apos-trophy (an excessive growth of apostrophes that will grow exponentially, cancerously, if left unchecked). Note the quintuple apostrophe stack at the end of the sentence, as well as the strange ‘It’ hemmed in as a result of the contraction. 

 This pattern of apostro-stacking continues on ad infinitum. If the Apos-trophy is not taken seriously and treated at an early stage, the results can be disastrous. Although the quotation mark/apostrophe stacking which occurs at the end is typically not that big of an issue, there is a certain part of my brain that begs for a notationally succinct way to express arbitrarily many quotes, rather than this simplistic, brute force approach. At what point does scientific notation become useful in grammar?

Now, we come to a unique territory in the land of written things. I must confess, dear linguistics lovers, that I have not been entirely honest with you. I am no practitioner of the noble arts of tongue and type; instead, I am a mere stooge of the god of mathematics. I know, I know, I can’t believe it myself. However, personal choices aside, the fields of physics, mathematics, and later computer science, have co-opted a great number of punctuation marks to their own ends. Unsatisfied with the Latin alphabet, they moved on to consume the Greek, Hebrew, Germanic alphabets, and the whole menagerie of English punctuation (I mean, there’s usage for +=-/’`~!#%^*()[]{}|<> and more within Math 112 & 113 alone). They even started making up their own symbols to boot (, ∮, and anyone?). Between you and me, I’ve heard them discussing taking on Icelandic, Japanese, Katakana, Devanagari, and even the conlangs! I would like to call out the coders in particular for their. . . extravagant creativity in the re-use of punctuation marks as code parsing devices (% Please LaTeX, backslash is so very far away from the rest of the keyboard, can we change it to something more efficient?). Although this subject might not strictly be ‘grammar’, it’s close enough to syntax that I’ll give it a pass for this article. 

These creative reformers push the boundaries of grammar into the future. Just as the ampersand (&) evolved from the Latin et (and), created by scribes who were sick of writing things out a certain way, new generations have been getting creative with punctuation as we move into the digital age. Of course, emoticons are the new pictographs, but beyond that there are such inventions as the famous interrobang– the combo question-exclamation mark. Who could’ve thought of such a thing‽ 

Another fascinating (and potentially very useful) invention is the percontation point, used to denote a rhetorical question. I’ll said it once again: who could have thought of that⸮ Henry Denham, it turns out, in the 1500s. 

Really, punctuation is nothing more than we agree it to be. And, as much as prescriptivists would like to quell deviant behavior (note the ‘and’ after a period here, regarded as criminal in some circles), it is ultimately inevitable that grammar is little more than marks on paper. It is important to remember that these marks mean as much, or as little, as we let them. If you see a niche in our current grammar scheme that needs to be filled, fill it by making your own marks! See where creativity can take you. 

Sourced mostly from Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss. If you have a fun fact or topic that you would like to be brought to light, email me at qhoop@reed.edu!