The Philosophy of Punctuation
Garret at dangerousmeta points to an article by Paul Robinson on a subject close to my heart.
Rules are important, no question about it. But by themselves they are insufficient. Unless one has an emotional investment, rules are too easily forgotten. What we must instill, I’m convinced, is an attitude toward punctuation, a set of feelings about both the process in general and the individual marks of punctuation. That set of feelings might be called a philosophy of punctuation.
The article is far from a call to punctuational pluralism although it’s not exactly proscriptive either. Robinson seems to suggest trying to get by with only periods and commas – no en dashes!? – and comes down hard on the semicolon of which he says there is currently an epidemic (the article dates from 1980).
Coincidentally I recently re-read Nicholson Baker’s essay on punctuation called, simply enough, “The History of Punctuation” which is collected in The Size of Thoughts. Baker has kinder things to say about the “semi-colon” as he has it (the Shorter OED omits the hyphen which is good; “semicolon” is more its own thing while “semi-colon” is merely a modified something else), calling it “that supremely self-possessed valet of phraseology” while admitting that it is “even now subject to episodes of neglect and derision.”
He goes on to show Joyce preferring the more Attic colon and Beckett ridding his prose of “what must have seemed to him an emblem of vulgar, high-Victorian applied ornament, a cast-iron flower of mass-produced Ciceronianism” (brilliant!) while Donald Barthelme apparently thought the semicolon “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly.”
Essential reading for those of us who struggle to train the blue heelers and border collies of our intellect which we shoo out to the paddocks of thought to round up the wooly “punctles” and bring them safely home.
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Posted to General Rants • 2002.06.08 (Sat) • 10:59
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