Spotted on the New York City subway yesterday. Very cryptic.
The mystery is presumably deliberate, but is the error? I can’t decide which is worse: not knowing what it means, or wondering whom to blame for the assault on our linguistic senses …
Category Archives: Punctuation
Let’s get diacritical: necessary, helpful or pretentious?
Here’s a little exercise: which of the words in the following sentence do you think need a diacritic (or some sort of accent), and which don’t?
“Chloe and Rene are cooperating: she’s reading his expose and he’s proofing her resume in a cafe where they’re eating pate as an appetizer, chicken mole as an entree, and souffle for dessert, all washed down with some rose, sake, frappe, and a soupcon of naive romance.”
As we can see from this sentence, there are a few English words — such as rosé, exposé, resumé, and saké — that can be more easily distinguished in meaning from their non-accented homographs (in this case the nouns rose and sake and the verbs expose and resume) by donning a diacritic; others don’t need the linguistic leg-up to be understood. As well as clarifying meaning, accents can serve another helpful purpose: to indicate pronunciation (e.g. frappé, naïve, soufflé).
English, unlike most other European languages, doesn’t have many words that contain diacritics, unless they have been adopted from other languages — especially French — and haven’t been fully assimilated into the vocabulary. However, there are a few exceptions: loanwords that appear in English more frequently with their native diacritics than not are café, cliché, and passé; also, curiously, those associated with food and cookery are less likely to lose their accents (eg. soupçon, soufflé and entrée). Words that have long been in the English vocabulary, even if originally imported from other parts of the world, tend to lose their foreign accessories eventually: hence facade, elite, decor, role and debut. The Associated Press, like most important style guides, ignores all accents. The Economist offers a sensible but ambiguous prescription, allowing for pronunciation accents that are considered ‘crucial’ and advocating accents ‘on French words’ (but who is to determine what is crucial and what is still French?):
“On words now accepted as English, use accents only when they make a crucial difference to pronunciation: cliché, soupçon, façade, café, communiqué, exposé (but chateau, decor, elite, feted, naive). If you use one accent (except the tilde—strictly, a diacritical sign), use all: émigré, mêlée, protégé, résumé. Put the accents and cedillas on French names and words, umlauts on German ones, accents and tildes on Spanish ones, and accents, cedillas and tildes on Portuguese ones: Françoise de Panafieu, Wolfgang Schäuble, Federico Peña, José Manuel Barroso. Leave accents and diacritical marks off other foreign names. Any foreign word in italics should, however, be given its proper accents.”
A number of words dress up or down — with or without their accents — according to personal and house style; examples are resumé, saké, naïve, élan, and séance. Proper names such as Renée, Zoë and Chloë* tend to retain rather than omit their original diacritical marks, arguably for their color as much as to encourage their correct pronunciation. The reality star Khloé Kardashian changed her first name from Khlóe to Khloé. Go figure.
Some old-fashioned (and dare I say slightly pretentious) writers prefer to retain accents that the rest of the English-speaking world have long since allowed to fall by the wayside: you’ll occasionally see élite, rôle, début and even hôtel in especially pompous prose. The diaeresis (similar to the German umlaut, and used to indicate neighboring vowels that shouldn’t be mixed but are pronounced separately) also falls into this old-fashioned category — naïve being a fairly common but singular exception (along with the girls’ names mentioned above). Words such as coöperate, reëstablish, and noöne now have modern spellings, often using a hyphen to separate offending vowel pairs: the OED lists them respectively as cooperate or co-operate, re-establish, and no one (two separate words). However, the New Yorker magazine, presumably staying true to its nearly 90-year-old style guide, still uses the diaeresis with consistency and pride.
* Chloe is the name of a 1927 jazz standard written by Charles N. Daniels and Gus Kahn; a 2009 movie starring Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson and Amanda Seyfried; a hurricane (0f 1967); and a tropical storm (1971). Chloé is a French fashion house founded in 1952, and a 1875 painting by Jules Lefebvre. 402 Chloë is a large main-belt asteroid named after the goddess.
Sealed with an x
Thirty years ago, in September 1982, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh invented the smiley face. That is, the typed smiley face. Scott Fahlman was frustrated by the fact that on the university’s electronic bulletin board — an early version of the online newsgroup — irony was being lost on a number of the geeky scientists participating in these online discussions: they often just didn’t get the joke. Fahlman suggested using a colon, a hyphen and a closed parenthesis — roughly approximating a smile on its side — as a ‘joke-marker’, to denote those entries that shouldn’t necessarily be taken seriously. Little did Fahlman know at the time that his clever and very useful invention would soon spread beyond his newsgroup to the entire college faculty and student body, before ultimately landing on the World Wide Web, where it spawned a whole population and language of what we now call “emoticons”. Fahlman modestly gives credit to Vladimir Nabokov for coming up with the idea before he did; when the Russian novelist was asked by a New York Times writer in 1969, “How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?”, Nabokov replied with a virtual wink: “I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile – some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.”
Is the emoticon a symptom and symbol of our increasing verbal laziness? Are we no longer able to denote happiness or sadness, humor or irony using just our words? Or perhaps this goes beyond verbal competency and effort. In this age of communicating to the masses — with multiple CCs and BCCs on a single e-mail, hundreds of Facebook friends and thousands of Twitter followers around the world, and the risk of a simple mistake or misunderstanding ‘going viral’ — we can’t always depend on ourselves to get it right and on all our readers to even get it. We don’t even know many of the people who are reading our our e-mails, newsletters or posts nowadays, so we’re writing in the dark. Humor and especially irony vary enormously across languages and cultures; even between the Americans and the Brits, there’s a gaping difference in the use, expectation and understanding of irony, especially in everyday communications, so the opportunities for and likelihood of misreadings and misunderstandings are at an all-time high. When the stakes are high, an emoticon might just save the day, preventing lawsuits, tears, or just hurt feelings.
James Marshall has compiled one of the most comprehensive and entertaining lists of emoticons (of the pure keyboard – ie. non-Unicode – kind): with more than 2,000 entries, his Canonical Smiley List is a thing of beauty when you have some time to kill: http://marshall.freeshell.org/smileys.html
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Not exactly an emoticon but falling into the same category of emotional-keyboard-shortcuts is the ubiquitous digital kiss: “x”. This is surprisingly not a 20th-century phenomenon: The use of x to denote a kiss dates back to as early as 1763, as cited by the OED. The symbolic X itself is very old, starting with the Medieval practice of allowing illiterates to sign official documents with an X (according to Wikipedia). Kissing the X before witnesses was a sign of sincerity — much like kissing the Bible or a Christian cross, and so the letter X came to symbolize a kiss. The first literary citation of three or more x‘s at the bottom of a letter denoting multiple kisses was in 1901, also according to the OED.*
Is the x (and the xoxo of Gossip Girl fame) now spreading beyond friendly/romantic/personal correspondence and into the office environment? Not just into professional communications, but into the murky world of office politics? And is this just a girl thing? A fascinating article in this month’s Atlantic explores this very real and scary development.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-xo-factor/309174/
Kisses and Hugs in the Office
How a once-intimate sign-off is feminizing the workplace, for better or worse
By Jessica Bennett and Rachel Simmons
Cody Haltom
The phone call was friendly, the kind any two professional contacts might have. A colleague had put Amanda McCall, a comedy writer in New York, in touch with a producer in Los Angeles. The two women had admired each other’s work from afar. They chatted about whether they might want to collaborate on a project. They made plans to talk again.
The next morning, McCall received an e‑mail from the producer. “Absolutely LOVED talking,” the woman wrote, followed by a seemingly endless string of X’s and O’s. That afternoon, a follow-up to the follow-up arrived, subject line “xo.” The body read simply: “xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo.”
McCall was mystified. Should she e‑mail back? Should she ask her what it meant? Was she weird for thinking this was weird? “I’d never seen so many hugs or kisses in any kind of correspondence, even from my parents or boyfriends,” she says, laughing. “In which case: Was this person actually in love with me? And if I didn’t respond with equal love, was it going to hurt her feelings?”
This e‑mail was extreme, yes—yet it’s an example of a tic that’s come to plague professional correspondence, especially among women. The use of xo to denote hugs and kisses dates back to at least 1763, when The Oxford English Dictionary first defined X as “kiss,” but e‑mail and social media have provided a newly fertile habitat.
“I feel like xo has taken on its own kind of life,” says Karli Kasonik, a Washington-based consultant.
“I do it, most women I know do it,” says Asie Mohtarez, a writer and social-media editor, noting that she prefers a single x to the full xo.
“In my field, you almost have to use it,” says Kristin Esposito, a yoga instructor in New York.
And no, xo is not a habit unique to 20‑somethings reared on Gossip Girl. It has surfaced in the digital correspondence of everyone from Arianna Huffington to Nora Ephron. Wendy Williams, the talk-show host, says she wishes she could stop using it, but admits that she can’t. Anne-Marie Slaughter—foreign-policy wonk, Princeton professor, and she who still can’t have it all—doesn’t xo, but knows several professional women who do. In Diane Sawyer’s newsroom, staffers say, the anchor uses xo so frequently that its omission can spark panic.
As e‑mail has evolved further and further from its postal roots, our sign-offs have become increasingly glib. While Sincerely or With best wishes might have been the ending of choice for a letter or a business memo, these expressions feel oddly formal when pinged back and forth in immediate, high-volume e‑mail exchanges. And so Sincerely begat Best begat Cheers and so on, until, somewhere along the line, xo slipped in.
At first, its virtual identity was clear: a pithy farewell, sweeter than See you later, less personal than Love. Men could xo their wives. Girlfriends could xo girlfriends. It was a digital kiss—meant, of course, for somebody you’d actually kiss. But soon enough, nonstop e‑mails and IMs and tweets began to dilute its intimacy factor. “You could compare [it] to how the epistolary greeting Dear changed over time, originally just for addressing loved ones but eventually becoming neutral,” says Ben Zimmer, a linguist and lexicologist.
Today, xo is so common that researchers at Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford have studied its use in social media, and confirmed what most everyone on the Internet already knows: xo is a female phenomenon. Among Twitter users, 11 percent of women xo in tweets, compared with only 2.5 percent of men.
This gender divide has spawned a new breed of etiquette dilemmas, especially in the workplace. Can xo-ing colleagues shore up office alliances, or does the practice cross a line? Does one run the risk of being labeled a bitch for refusing to reciprocate? And what happens if a woman accidentally xo’s her male boss?
He almost certainly wouldn’t xo back, for fear of coming off as unauthoritative, unprofessional, or just plain creepy. Zimmer says he would never dare xo anyone but his wife (though the female editor of his Boston Globe column xx’s him frequently). Most men say xo has become so feminized, they wouldn’t even consider using it. “I’ve never signed an e‑mail, letter, text, stone tablet, smoke signal, or any other form of communication with xo,” says Brett Webster, a television producer in L.A. “Rightfully or wrongfully so, I would assume a guy who includes xo in correspondence is gay. Or a football coach.”
Why, then, has xo become such a fashionable accessory for women? Why, after all the strides we’ve made to be taken seriously at work, must we end our e‑mails with the digital equivalent of a pink Gelly Roll pen?
Certainly, the feminine utilities of xo are multifold. Insert it casually as a symbol of closeness, authentic or not, with a friend or colleague—or, as Slaughter sees it, as a small high-five of professional sisterhood. Use it à la Sawyer, to inspire loyalty (or fear) among staffers. Or simply resort to it as easy filler when you don’t want to put the effort into something longer. “It’s much faster to type the four-stroke xxoo than With warm wishes followed by a comma,” says Lynn Gaertner-Johnston, a writing expert and the founder of a company called Syntax Training. “If someone can type a smiley face in one second, why write a sentence like I appreciate your thoughtfulness?”
There’s also the matter of women’s tonal antennae, which pick up on even the smallest shifts. “In e‑mail, ending a command with a period can feel brusque,” says Anne Trubek, a professor of rhetoric at Oberlin College. So we use xo, along with other effusive indicators—exclamation points, ALL CAPS, repeating letters (Hiiii)—to signal emotional availability. According to Deborah Tannen, a Georgetown linguist who studies gender, these habits tend to parallel the way women speak as compared with men: with intonation patterns that go up and down more, with more emphasis on certain words, and about more-personal topics.
In some settings, xo-ing may be a way to indirectly apologize for being direct—think of all those studies concluding that women must be authoritative in the office, but also nice. One such study, by a psychologist at NYU, determined that the best way for a woman to be perceived as likeable at work is to temper strong demands with “a little bit of sugar.” In that context, xo can be seen as a savvy means of navigating a persistent double standard.
Or maybe, as Trubek suggests, xo‑ing is just like actual hugging: women do it more often than men, some women do it more often than other women, and that’s that.
“As someone who’s regularly ended letters to her accountant with xxx, I refuse to feel any shame for this widespread woman-trait,” says Caitlin Moran, the British feminist and author of How to Be a Woman. “Statistics show we’re slowly taking over the world, and I’m happy for us to do it one xxx e‑mail at a time.”
Jessica Bennett, formerly of Newsweek, is the executive editor of Tumblr. Rachel Simmons is the author of Odd Girl Out and The Curse of the Good Girl.
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* Enwiktionary: OED: “X” 1763 Gilbert White Letter (1901) I. vii. 132, I am with many a xxxxxxx and many a Pater noster and Ave Maria, Gil. White.
Period or no period? Obama made his choice. What’s yours?
As a huge fan of the ellipsis, I can’t understand why no-one suggested those three tantalizingly forward-thinking dots, instead of the “full stop”… And surely if the slogan represents an imperative (despite forward not being a verb), an exclamation mark would have served a better purpose.
But periods aside, why didn’t Obama stick his neck out and choose forwards, instead of forward? According to the OED: “The present distinction in usage between forward and forwards is that the latter expresses a definite direction viewed in contrast with other directions. In some contexts either form may be used without perceptible difference of meaning; the following are examples in which only one of them can now be used: ‘The ratchet-wheel can move only forwards’; ‘the right side of the paper has the maker’s name reading forwards’; ‘if you move at all it must be forwards’; ‘my companion has gone forward’; ‘to bring a matter forward’; ‘from this time forward’. The usage of earlier periods, and of modern dialects, varies greatly from that of mod. standard English. In U.S. forward is now generally used, to the exclusion of forwards, which was stigmatized by Webster (1832) as ‘a corruption’.
Forwards unambiguously denotes direction, in a way that forward doesn’t. But who wants a whiff of corruption in their campaign slogan?
I’ve never noticed the period after the The Wall Street Journal. on its masthead. How quaint.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444840104577553020326811222.html
Punctuation Nerds Stopped by Obama Slogan, ‘Forward.’
From Both Sides of the Aisle, a Question: Is Ending It With a Period Weird?
The. Obama. Campaign. Slogan. Is. Causing. Grammarians. Whiplash. Even for some in the president’s orbit, the final punctuation on ‘Forward.’ slams the brakes on a word supposed to convey momentum.
By Carol E. Lee
The. Obama. Campaign. Slogan. Is. Causing. Grammarians. Whiplash.
“Forward.” is the culprit. It was chosen to reflect the direction Mr. Obama promises to take the country if re-elected. It also is designed to implicitly convey the opposite: that likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney would set the nation in reverse.
Simple enough. Except the moment seven characters became eight, things got complicated. Period. Even for some in the president’s orbit, the added punctuation slams the brakes on a word supposed to convey momentum.
“It’s like ‘forward, now stop,’ ” said Austan Goolsbee, the former chairman of the National Economic Council who still advises the Obama campaign. He added, “It could be worse. It could be ‘Forward’ comma,” which would make it raise the question: “and now what?”
The president signed off on his own slogan, but evidently isn’t sold. “Forward! Period. Full stop,” he has joked to his campaign staff, according to an Obama adviser.
On that, if on nothing else, Mr. Obama has bipartisan support.
“It’s sort of a buzz kill,” said Rep. Pete King (R., N.Y.).
The period was a subject of a spirited debate as Mr. Obama’s senior advisers and outside consultants spent hours in a conference room at their Chicago campaign headquarters deliberating over the perfect slogan, according to an adviser who was in attendance.
Does a period add emphasis? Yes! Does it undermine the sense of the word? Maybe!
David Axelrod, the president’s longtime messaging guru, is a champion of the period. “There’s some finality to it,” Mr. Axelrod said. For those who think it stops “forward” in its tracks, he has a suggestion: “Tell them just to put two more dots on it, and it’ll seem like it keeps on going.”
The period debate hasn’t been confined to the upper echelons of the Obama campaign. Politicians, grammarians and designers who brand people and products have noticed it, too.
“There’s been some speculation that the period really gives the feeling of something ending rather than beginning,” said Catherine Pages, an art director in Washington, D.C.
In 1992, George H.W. Bush’s line, “Who do you trust?” generated chatter about the use of “who” versus “whom.” Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 slogan “I like Ike” is clearly a sentence, but didn’t include a period. George W. Bush’s “Yes, America Can” slogan included a comma; Mr. Obama’s “Yes We Can” chant four years later did not.
Meanwhile, the title of the super PAC supporting Mr. Romney, “Restore Our Future,” seems to bend the rules of space and time, if not grammar.
Those who brandish red pens for a living are divided on whether Mr. Obama’s campaign slogan passes muster.
“It would be quite a stretch to say it’s grammatically correct,” said Mignon Fogarty, author of “Grammar Girl’s 101 Troublesome Words You’ll Master in No Time.” “You could say it’s short for ‘we’re moving forward.’ But really it’s not a sentence.”
The only single words that properly end with a period are verbs, Ms. Fogarty added, or interjections such as “wow.”
George Lakoff, a linguistics professor at University of California Berkeley who is well-known in Democratic circles, has a different verdict. He says that the slogan respects the period’s proper use because “Forward.” is an imperative sentence.
“You can look at the period as adding a sense of finality, making a strong statement: Forward. Period. And no more,” Mr. Lakoff said. “Whether that’s effective is another question.”
Joining the Obama campaign is the alternative rock band fun., which added a period on forming in 2008. In a written statement, two of the group’s founders, Jack Antonoff and Andrew Dost, described the punctuation as “our way of sedating the word fun. We love how quick and sharp ‘fun’ is, but in no way do we intend to give people the impression that we’re going to walk into rooms doing back flips.”
On its page-one nameplate and elsewhere, The Wall Street Journal maintains its period, a holdover from the 1800s. No one at the paper knows why the Journal kept it when other papers gradually dropped their traditional periods, a spokeswoman said.
In presidential campaigns, discussions over slogans often focus on pre-emptive damage control. “We’d sit around the conference rooms and have these discussions,” said Steve Hildebrand, a deputy campaign manager for Mr. Obama’s 2008 campaign. “You wonder if they’re going to catch on; you wonder if people are going to make fun of them.”
Shortly after the 2012 line was unveiled in April, late-night talk show host Jay Leno said, “That’s a good message for Obama. He’s telling voters, whatever you do don’t look back at all those promises I made. Just look forward.”
Mr. Romney has called the “Forward.” slogan “absurd,” and has seized on it to argue Mr. Obama’s policies would take the country “forward over a cliff.”
Mr. Romney’s slogan, “Believe in America” (no period), has its share of critics as well. “I think that’s about as close to a standard slogan as you can possibly get,” said Fred Davis, a Republican media consultant.
Rep. Steve Israel of New York, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and a former public-relations manager, said he prefers the period over an exclamation point or nothing at all.
“Forward without a period leaves open the question: ‘In what direction?’ ” Mr. Israel said. “But that’s just the old, frustrated, former public-relations executive in me.”
It is possible the president isn’t the best judge of his own marketing. During his successful 2008 run, Mr. Obama told his campaign staff he wasn’t sold on the slogan “Change We Can Believe In,” according to a book written by close aide David Plouffe.
He also thought the campaign’s signature symbol—a red, white and blue rising sun—was “cheesy,” recalled longtime Obama adviser Robert Gibbs.
The period has mysteriously been dropped in several recent Obama campaign ads. Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said there is no particular reason behind the omission. “Stay on your toes—anything could happen,” he said. “Do not be surprised if we introduce a semicolon.”
Write to Carol E. Lee at carol.lee@wsj.com
Using semicolons: an act of faith or pretension?
“The semicolon sat there in my literary utensil drawer like a cherry pitter, theoretically functional, but fussy and unloved and probably destined for the yard-sale table.” A beautifully-written love-letter to the semicolon by Ben Dolnick, published in Monday’s New York Times.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/semicolons-a-love-story/
Semicolons: A Love Story
By BEN DOLNICKDraft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
When I was a teenager, newly fixated on becoming a writer, I came across a piece of advice from Kurt Vonnegut that affected me like an ice cube down the back of my shirt.
“Do not use semicolons,” he said. “They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”
At the time I was less struck by the cranky, casual bigotry of the statement (a great deal of Vonnegut’s advice sounds as if it was rasped between grandfatherly coughing fits) than by the thrilling starkness of the prohibition. A writer was simply not to use semicolons. Ever.
At that point I’d written a number of not very good short stories over which I’d sprinkled semicolons (along with inapt adjectives and “symbolic” character names) like the wishful seasonings of an amateur cook. Now I would have, if it had been physically possible, scrubbed the accursed symbol from my keyboard and never thought about semicolons again, except to harrumph cruelly when I witnessed other, lesser writers succumbing to this particular form of misguidedness.
Advice from Vonnegut was not, to me, just any advice. To say that he was my literary hero doesn’t quite capture the intensity of the worship and obsession I heaped upon him. I wrote him letters that I can only pray he never saw. I read all of his books and then, once I’d finished, I started collecting editions of “Slaughterhouse Five” in other languages (none of which, it goes without saying, I could read a word of). I even began narrating my life to myself in his weary, gravelly voice. (Ben sat down to finish his history homework. What this meant, mostly, was learning how one group of apes butchered another group of apes. So it goes.)
Vonnegut’s dismissal of semicolons therefore struck me as more than a mere matter of style. This was, like his refusal to describe his war experience in heroic terms, a demonstration of virtue. To abjure semicolons was to declare oneself pure of heart, steely-eyed, sadly disillusioned. I pictured Vonnegut and Hemingway sitting together on a porch, squinting grimly out at the road, shaking their heads at what the literary world had come to. I wanted nothing more in life than to climb onto one of the empty rockers beside them.
Peter ArkleMy disdain for semicolons outlasted my devotion to Vonnegut. Well into college I avoided them, trusting in the keyboard’s adjacent, unpretentious comma and period to divvy up my thoughts. I imagined that, decades hence, if some bright-eyed teenager were to ask me for advice, I’d pass Vonnegut’s prohibition right along, minus the troublesome bit about transvestites and hermaphrodites. By now I’d come across Isaac Babel’s famous description of periods as irons capable of stabbing the heart. And I knew, of course, that commas were indispensable. The semicolon sat there in my literary utensil drawer like a cherry pitter, theoretically functional, but fussy and unloved and probably destined for the yard-sale table.
So it’s been with considerable surprise, these past few years, that I’ve found myself becoming something of a cherry-pitting maniac. This may just, as Vonnegut says, reflect the fact that I’ve now been to college, though honestly I can’t remember anyone’s expressing a single semicolon-related sentiment while I was there. Regardless, I’ve come to love the awkward things, and to depend on them for easing me through a complex thought.
I blame my grammatical fall on an unlikely corrupter: William James. For the past year or two I’ve had on my nightstand a fat Library of America collection of his writing, and it took me a while to realize that one of the things I was loving about it — one of the things that made me feel as if I was sitting beside a particularly intelligent, humane and excitable friend on a long trip in a horse-drawn carriage — was his use of semicolons. James’s paragraphs, as lucid and unpretentious as can be, are divided and subdivided, as intricately structured as the anatomical diagrams he includes in “Psychology: Briefer Course.” Semicolons, along with exclamation points and dashes and whole sackfuls of commas, are, for him, vital tools in keeping what he called the “stream of thought” from appearing to the reader as a wild torrent.
And once I’d seen him using semicolons this way, their pleasing possibilities became irresistible. I’d been finding myself increasingly flummoxed by the difficulty of capturing even a rough approximation of thought on the page, and it seemed absurd to leave such a handy tool unused out of obscure loyalty.
Many times a week I’d been experiencing a mental event like this: I’d be reading an article about a flood in Mexico, which would lead me to thinking about a wedding I once went to in Cancún, which would lead me to thinking about marriage, which would lead to gay marriage, which would lead to the presidential election, which would lead to swing states, which would lead to a fascinatingly terrible country song called “Swing” — and I’d be three songs into a Trace Adkins YouTube marathon before I’d glance back down at the newspaper on the table.
It’s in honoring this movement of mind, this tendency of thoughts to proliferate like yeast, that I find semicolons so useful. Their textbook function — to separate parts of a sentence “that need a more distinct break than a comma can signal, but that are too closely connected to be made into separate sentences” — has come to seem like a dryly beautiful little piece of psychological insight. No other piece of punctuation so compactly captures the way in which our thoughts are both liquid and solid, wave and particle.
And so, far from being pretentious, semicolons can be positively democratic. To use a semicolon properly can be an act of faith. It’s a way of saying to the reader, who is already holding one bag of groceries, here, I know it’s a lot, but can you take another? And then (in the case of William James) another? And another? And one more? Which sounds, of course, dreadful, and like just the sort of discourtesy a writer ought strenuously to avoid. But the truth is that there can be something wonderful in being festooned in carefully balanced bags; there’s a kind of exquisite tension, a feeling of delicious responsibility, in being so loaded up that you seem to have half a grocery store suspended from your body.
So yes, Kurt Vonnegut: simplicity, in grammar as in all things, is a virtue, not to be sneezed at. But I can’t agree that semicolons represent absolutely nothing; they represent, for me anyway, the pleasure in discovering that no piece of writing advice, however stark, however beloved its deliverer, should ever be adopted mindlessly.
Draft welcomes submissions at draft@nytimes.com.
The Most Comma Mistakes, by Ben Yagoda
A must read …
Posted yesterday on the New York Times Opinionator blog.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/the-most-comma-mistakes/
May 21, 2012, 9:17 pm
The Most Comma Mistakes
By BEN YAGODADraft is a series about the art and craft of writing.
As I noted in my earlier article, rules and conventions about when to use and not to use commas are legion. But certain errors keep popping up. Here are a few of them.
Identification Crisis
If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times. I’m referring to a student’s writing a sentence like:
I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.
Comma after “movie,” comma after “friend” and, sometimes, comma after “Paris” as well. None is correct — unless “Midnight in Paris” is the only movie in the world and Jessie is the writer’s only friend. Otherwise, the punctuation should be:
I went to see the movie “Midnight in Paris” with my friend Jessie.
If that seems wrong or weird or anything short of clearly right, bear with me a minute and take a look at another correct sentence:
I went to see Woody Allen’s latest movie, “Midnight in Paris,” with my oldest friend, Jessie.
You need a comma after “movie” because this and only this is Mr. Allen’s newest movie in theaters, and after “Jessie” because she and only she is the writer’s oldest friend.
The syntactical situation I’m talking about is identifier-name. The basic idea is that if the name (in the above example, “Jessie”) is the only thing in the world described by the identifier (“my oldest friend”), use a comma before the name (and after it as well, unless you’ve come to the end of the sentence). If not, don’t use any commas.
Grammatically, there are various ways of describing what’s going on. One helpful set of terms is essential vs. nonessential. When the identifier makes sense in the sentence by itself, then the name is nonessential and you use a comma before it. Otherwise, no comma. That explains an exception to the only-thing-in-the-world rule: when the words “a,” “an” or “some,” or a number, come before the description or identification of a name, use a comma.
A Bronx plumber, Stanley Ianella, bought the winning lottery ticket.
When an identifier describes a unique person or thing and is preceded by “the” or a possessive, use a comma:
Baseball’s home run leader, Barry Bonds, will be eligible for the Hall of Fame next year.
My son, John, is awesome. (If you have just one son.)
But withhold the comma if not unique:
My son John is awesome. (If you have more than one son.)
The artist David Hockney is a master of color.
The celebrated British artist David Hockney is a master of color.
And even
The gay, bespectacled, celebrated British artist David Hockney is a master of color.
(Why are there commas after “gay” and “bespectacled” but not “celebrated”? Because “celebrated” and “British” are different sorts of adjectives. The sentence would not work if “and” were placed between them, or if their order were reversed.)
If nothing comes before the identification, don’t use a comma:
The defense team was led by the attorney Harold Cullen.
No one seems to have a problem with the idea that if the identification comes after the name, it should always be surrounded by commas:
Steve Meyerson, a local merchant, gave the keynote address.
However, my students, at least, often wrongly omit a “the” or an “a” in sentences of this type:
Jill Meyers, sophomore, is president of the sorority.
To keep the commas, it needs to be:
Jill Meyers, a sophomore, is president of the sorority.
Peter ArkleThe Case of the Missing Comma
A related issue is the epidemic of missing commas after parenthetical phrases or appositives — that is, self-enclosed material that’s within a sentence, but not essential to its meaning. The following sentences all lack a necessary comma. Can you spot where?
My father, who gave new meaning to the expression “hard working” never took a vacation.
He was born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1964.
Philip Roth, author of “Portnoy’s Complaint” and many other books is a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize.
If you said “working,” “Iowa” and “books,” give yourself full marks. I’m not sure why this particular mistake is so tempting. It may sometimes be because these phrases are so long that by the time we get to the end of them, we’ve forgotten about the first comma. In any case, a strategy to prevent it is to remember the acronym I.C.E. Whenever you find yourself using a comma before an Identification, Characterization or Explanation, remember that there has to be a comma after the I.C.E. as well.
Splice Girls, and Boys
“Comma splice” is a term used for the linking of two independent clauses — that is, grammatical units that contain a subject and a verb and could stand alone as sentences — with a comma. When I started teaching at the University of Delaware some years ago, I was positively gobsmacked by the multitude of comma splices that confronted me. They have not abated.
Here’s an example:
He used to be a moderate, now he’s a card-carrying Tea Partier.
It’s easy to fix in any number of ways:
He used to be a moderate. Now he’s a card-carrying Tea Partier.
He used to be a moderate; now he’s a card-carrying Tea Partier.
He used to be a moderate, but now he’s a card-carrying Tea Partier.
He used to be a moderate — now he’s a card-carrying Tea Partier.
How to choose among them? By reading aloud — always the best single piece of writing advice — and choosing the version that best suits the context, your style and your ear. I would go with the semicolon. How about you?
Two particular situations seem to bring out a lot of comma splices. The first is in quotations:
“The way they’ve been playing, the team will be lucky to survive the first round,” the coach said, “I’m just hoping someone gets a hot hand.”
The comma after “said” has to be replaced with a period.
The other issue is the word “however,” which more and more people seem to want to use as a conjunction, comparable to “but” or “yet.” So they will write something like:
The weather is great today, however it’s supposed to rain tomorrow.
That may be acceptable someday. Today, however, it’s a comma splice. Correct punctuation could be:
The weather is great today, but it’s supposed to rain tomorrow.
Or
The weather is great today. However, it’s supposed to rain tomorrow.
Comma splices can be O.K. when you’re dealing with short clauses where even a semicolon would slow things down too much:
I talked to John, John talked to Lisa.
Samuel Beckett was the poet laureate of the comma splice. He closed his novel “The Unnamable” with a long sentence that ends:
… perhaps it’s done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
Which goes to show, I suppose, that rules are made to be broken.
WSJ piece ‘on the misuse of apostrophe’s (did your eye just twitch?)’ …
This piece in the Wall Street Journal takes a stroll through the history of punctuation marks and looks at how they have evolved – or in some cases become extinct – as the usage and culture of language, and even its platforms, have changed.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204618704576641182784805212.html?mod=wsj_share_tweet
Is This the Future of Punctuation!?
On the misuse of apostrophe’s (did your eye just twitch?) and our increasingly rhetorical language
By HENRY HITCHINGS
Punctuation arouses strong feelings. You have probably come across the pen-wielding vigilantes who skulk around defacing movie posters and amending handwritten signs that advertise “Rest Room’s” or “Puppy’s For Sale.”
People fuss about punctuation not only because it clarifies meaning but also because its neglect appears to reflect wider social decline. And while the big social battles seem intractable, smaller battles over the use of the apostrophe feel like they can be won.
Yet the status of this and other cherished marks has long been precarious. The story of punctuation is one of comings and goings.
Early manuscripts had no punctuation at all, and those from the medieval period suggest haphazard innovation, with more than 30 different marks. The modern repertoire of punctuation emerged as printers in the 15th and 16th centuries strove to limit this miscellany.
Many punctuation marks are less venerable than we might imagine. Parentheses were first used around 1500, having been observed by English writers and printers in Italian books. Commas were not employed until the 16th century; in early printed books in English one sees a virgule (a slash like this /), which the comma replaced around 1520.
Other marks enjoyed briefer success. There used to be a clunky paragraph sign known as a pilcrow ; initially it was a C with a slash drawn through it. Similar in its effect was one of the oldest punctuation symbols, a horizontal ivy leaf called a hedera . It appears in 8th-century manuscripts, separating text from commentary, and after a period out of fashion it made an unexpected return in early printed books. Then it faded from view.
Another mark, now obscure, is the point d’ironie, sometimes known as a “snark.” A back-to-front question mark, it was deployed by the 16th-century printer Henry Denham to signal rhetorical questions, and in 1899 the French poet Alcanter de Brahm suggested reviving it. More recently, the difficulty of detecting irony and sarcasm in electronic communication has prompted fresh calls for a revival of the point d’ironie. But the chances are slim that it will make a comeback.
In fact, Internet culture generally favors a lighter, more informal style of punctuation. True, emoticons have sprung up to convey nuances of mood and tone. Moreover, typing makes it easy to amplify punctuation: splattering 20 exclamation marks on a page, or using multiple question marks to signify theatrical incredulity. But, overall, punctuation is being renounced.
How might punctuation now evolve? The dystopian view is that it will vanish. I find this conceivable, though not likely. But we can see harbingers of such change: editorial austerity with commas, the newsroom preference for the period over all other marks, and the taste for visual crispness.
Though it is not unusual to hear calls for new punctuation, the marks proposed tend to cannibalize existing ones. In this vein, you may have encountered the interrobang , which signals excited disbelief.
Such marks are symptoms of an increasing tendency to punctuate for rhetorical rather than grammatical effect. Instead of presenting syntactical and logical relationships, punctuation reproduces the patterns of speech.
One manifestation of this is the advance of the dash. It imitates the jagged urgency of conversation, in which we change direction sharply and with punch. Dashes became common only in the 18th century. Their appeal is visual, their shape dramatic. That’s what a modern, talky style of writing seems to demand.
By contrast, use of the semicolon is dwindling. Although colons were common as early as the 14th century, the semicolon was rare in English books before the 17th century. It has always been regarded as a useful hybrid—a separator that’s also a connector—but it’s a trinket beloved of people who want to show that they went to the right school.
More surprising is the eclipse of the hyphen. Traditionally, it has been used to link two halves of a compound noun and has suggested that a new coinage is on probation. But now the noun is split (fig leaf, hobby horse) or rendered without a hyphen (crybaby, bumblebee). It may be that the hyphen’s last outpost will be in emoticons, where it plays a leading role.
Graphic designers, who favor an uncluttered aesthetic, dislike hyphens. They are also partly responsible for the disappearance of the apostrophe. This little squiggle first appeared in an English text in 1559. Its use has never been completely stable, and today confusion leads to the overcompensation that we see in those handwritten signs. The alternative is not to use apostrophes at all—an act of pragmatism easily mistaken for ignorance.
Defenders of the apostrophe insist that it minimizes ambiguity, but there are few situations in which its omission can lead to real misunderstanding.
The apostrophe is mainly a device for the eye, not the ear. And while I plan to keep handling apostrophes in accordance with the principles I was shown as a child, I am confident that they will either disappear or be reduced to little baubles of orthographic bling.
—Mr. Hitchings’s latest book. “The Language Wars: A History of Proper English,” will be published in November.
It’s National Punctuation Day … ! : )
It’s September 24: National Punctuation Day!! To celebrate, I’m going to indulge in my slightly weird form of synesthesia that has to do with commas and colons. I know: the brains of most synesthetes come alive with colors and personalities when they rest their eyes on numbers or letters; well, in my case it’s punctuation that does the trick — and not just when ‘:’ + ‘)’ = : ) … Here are a few of the characters that dance in my head when my eyes alight on these sentence markers.
The lowly, overused comma is both modest and attention-seeking, hoping to get noticed enough to make the reader pause for breath, but not enough, for the most part, to cause alarm, distraction, or closure. One of the most vital and possibly even the most argued-about little guys in our armory of written symbols, he plods along and does his job, bravely and unobtrusively, without too much fuss.
The passionate exclamation mark! So full of exuberance and life! And youthfulness! And sometimes uselessness! Used in excess by every teenager and texter! A shot of grammatical caffeine!!!
The underused colon: anticipating, leading, prodding: what explanation or surprise is going to follow it: where is it taking us? So often hijacked and substituted by its less pointed cousin, the comma, the colon looks and thinks forward: what’s next?
The stately and slightly smug semi-colon lords over the comma with its more majestic and powerful pause; without bringing closure, it begs us to stay with the thought; it teases us with the idea that there might be closure; but there’s more. Like a dominant chord before the final tonic, it keeps us dangling and hanging on until the denouement: the period.
The melancholy little ellipsis, which trails off into silence … Never really finishing its thought, but inviting speculation and ambiguity … Sometimes just inquisitive, other times provocative, it gives pause, and invites the reader to draw his own conclusions … A more classy version of the typewritten smiley face, the ellipsis hints at irony, jest, and sometimes it even flirts …
The mad professor’s dash — unable to stay on topic and always ready for an aside — livens and colors the flow of thought. Although it has to be used sparingly — too many dashes in a sentence cause distraction and confusion — its job is unique and can’t be delegated to the more pedestrian comma. No — the dash has some of the exclamation point’s vitality and elan. We write fluently and logically, following a steady stream of thoughts — and then the dash interrupts us, but it can’t be ignored.
~~~~~~~~~
Here’s how National Punctuation Day suggests that we celebrate this important day. And remember: don’t overdo it.
http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com/celebrate.html
Here’s a game plan for your celebration of National Punctuation Day®. A few words of caution: Don’t overdo it.
- Sleep late.
- Take a long shower or bath.
- Go out for coffee and a bagel (or two).
- Read a newspaper and circle all of the punctuation errors you find (or think you find, but aren’t sure) with a red pen.
- Take a leisurely stroll, paying close attention to store signs with incorrectly punctuated words.
- Stop in those stores to correct the owners.
- If the owners are not there, leave notes.
- Visit a bookstore and purchase a copy of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.
- Look up all the words you circled.
- Congratulate yourself on becoming a better written communicator.
- Go home.
- Sit down.
- Write an error-free letter to a friend.
- Take a nap. It has been a long day.
The Oxford comma: love it, hate it, or don’t care?
The Guardian takes a lighthearted look at one of Oxford’s most controversial exports.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/jul/03/pass-notes-oxford-comma?INTCMP=SRCH
Pass notes No 3,002: The Oxford comma
Elitist and irritating, or useful and precise? All you need to know about the controversial punctuation mark
Sunday 3 July 2011
Age: As old as the hills, Methuselah, and time itself.
Appearance: Looks just like any other comma.
So what makes it different? It’s rarer, only appearing after the penultimate item in a list of three or more objects, and even then only as and when the writer feels it necessary. Many won’t use it all, considering it ugly, elitist, and redundant. See?
Gah, it’s just a waste of a very small amount of ink. Which is why Oxford University’s PR team now advise their staff not to use it, a decision that kicked off a Twitter-storm of pedantic debate when it was mistakenly reported that publishers Oxford University Press had elected to put its beloved punctuation mark out to pasture. It has not.
But why does anyone care? You’re not the first to ask that question. In fact, it was posed publicly three years ago, in slightly swearier tones, by indie pop band Vampire Weekend, with their single Oxford Comma.
And the answer was? Because it saves confusion.
How so? Well, say I tell you that this week I’ve been listening to two of the most over-rated bands in the world, Vampire Weekend and the Killers. Without the wee Oxonian squiggle, that will read as if I’ve listened to just two bands and they’re both over-rated.
And with it? Pop in an Oxford comma and it’s all hunky-dory; I’ve listened to four bands and Vampire Weekend deserve every well-won scrap of their critical acclaim. Similarly, in a list containing conjoined items (bacon and egg, ladies and gentlemen, French and Saunders), the use of the OxCom can be a life-saver.
As you found out while listening to Beirut, Noah and The Whale and Vampire Weekend? Exactly. Although “The Whale and Vampire Weekend” sounds like an awesome band.
And an awesome weekend. True, true, and true.
Do say: “They’re divisive, annoying, and often unnecessary, but there is a time and a place for them.”
Don’t say: “Plus they do have some catchy tunes.”
Prose interrupted — yet again
A wonderfully thorough, entertaining and helpful article in Slate magazine about the rising epidemic of the dastardly em dash — and how we can cure it.
http://www.slate.com/id/2295413/
The Case—Please Hear Me Out—Against the Em Dash
Modern prose doesn’t need any more interruptions—seriously.
By Noreen Malone
Posted Tuesday, May 24, 2011, at 4:32 PM ET
According to the Associated Press Stylebook—Slate‘s bible for all things punctuation- and grammar-related—there are two main prose uses—the abrupt change and the series within a phrase—for the em dash. The guide does not explicitly say that writers can use the dash in lieu of properly crafting sentences, or instead of a comma or a parenthetical or a colon—and yet in practical usage, we do. A lot—or so I have observed lately. America’s finest prose—in blogs, magazines, newspapers, or novels—is littered with so many dashes among the dots it’s as if the language is signaling distress in Morse code.
What’s the matter with an em dash or two, you ask?—or so I like to imagine. What’s not to like about a sentence that explores in full all the punctuational options—sometimes a dash, sometimes an ellipsis, sometimes a nice semicolon at just the right moment—in order to seem more complex and syntactically interesting, to reach its full potential? Doesn’t a dash—if done right—let the writer maintain an elegant, sinewy flow to her sentences?
Nope—or that’s my take, anyway. Now, I’m the first to admit—before you Google and shame me with a thousand examples in the comments—that I’m no saint when it comes to the em dash. I never met a sentence I didn’t want to make just a bit longer—and so the dash is my embarrassing best friend. When the New York Times’ associate managing editor for standards—Philip B. Corbett, for the record—wrote a blog post scolding Times writers for overusing the dash (as many as five dashes snuck their way into a single 3.5-paragraph story on A1, to his horror), an old friend from my college newspaper emailed it to me. “Reminded me of our battles over long dashes,” he wrote—and, to tell the truth, I wasn’t on the anti-dash side back then. But as I’ve read and written more in the ensuing years, my reliance on the dash has come to feel like a pack-a-day cigarette habit—I know it makes me look and sound and feel terrible—and so I’m trying to quit.
The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don’t you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won’t be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that’s not yet complete? Strunk and White—who must always be mentioned in articles such as this one—counsel against overusing the dash as well: “Use a dash only when a more common mark of punctuation seems inadequate.” Who are we, we modern writers, to pass judgment—and with such shocking frequency—on these more simple forms of punctuation—the workmanlike comma, the stalwart colon, the taken-for-granted period? (One colleague—arguing strenuously that certain occasions call for the dash instead of other punctuation, for purposes of tone—told me he thinks of the parenthesis as a whisper, and the dash as a way of calling attention to a phrase. As for what I think of his observation—well, consider how I have chosen to offset it.)
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Perhaps, in some way, the recent rise of the dash—and this “trend” is just anecdotal observation; I admit I haven’t found a way to crunch the numbers—is a reaction to our attention-deficit-disordered culture, in which we toggle between tabs and ideas and conversations all day. An explanation is not an excuse, though—as Corbett wrote in another sensible harangue against the dash, “Sometimes a procession of such punctuation is a hint that a sentence is overstuffed or needs rethinking.” Why not try for clarity in our writing—if not our lives?
It’s unclear—even among the printing community—when the em dash came into common usage. Folklore—if you’re willing to trust it—holds that it’s been around since the days of Gutenberg but didn’t catch on until at least the 1700s because the em dash wasn’t used in the Bible, and thus was considered an inferior bit of punctuation. The symbol derives its name from its width—approximately equal to an m—and is easily confused with its close cousin the en dash, used more frequently across the pond, but here meant only to offset sports scores and the like. The em dash isn’t easily formed on computers—it requires some special keystrokes on both PCs and Macs—and so I will admit that at least some of my bile comes from, as a copy editor, endlessly changing other writers’ sloppy em-dash simulacra (the double dash, the single offset dash) to the real thing.
Perhaps the most famous dash-user in history—though she didn’t use the em dash conventionally—was Emily Dickinson. According to the essay “Emily Dickinson’s Volcanic Punctuation” from a 1993 edition of The Emily Dickinson Journal—a true general-interest read!—”Dickinson’s excessive use of dashes has been interpreted variously as the result of great stress and intense emotion, as the indication of a mental breakdown, and as a mere idiosyncratic, female habit.” Can there really be—at the risk of sounding like a troglodyte—something feminine about the use of a dash, some sort of lighthearted gossamer quality? Compare Dickinson’s stylistic flitting with the brutally short sentences of male writers—Hemingway, for instance—who, arguably, use their clipped style to evoke taciturn masculinity. Henry Fielding apparently rewrote his sister Sarah’s work heavily to edit out some of her idiosyncrasies—chief among them, a devotion to the dash. In Gore Vidal’s Burr, the title character complains—in a charming internal monologue—”Why am I using so many dashes? Like a schoolgirl. The dash is the sign of a poor style. Jefferson used to hurl them like javelins across the page.” So is the rise of the dash related—as everything seems to be these days—to the End of Men? (I kid—calm down.)
More likely, it’s the lack of hard-and-fast usage rules—even the AP’s guidelines are more suggestions than anything—that makes the dash so popular in our post-sentence-diagramming era. According to Lynne Truss—the closest thing we’ve got to a celebrity grammarian, thanks to her best-seller Eats, Shoots and Leaves—people use the em dash because “they know you can’t use it wrongly—which for a punctuation mark, is an uncommon virtue.”
So, fine, the em dash is easy to turn to—any port will do in a storm. But if you want to make your point—directly, with clarity, and memorably—I have some advice you’d do well to consider. Leave the damn em dash alone.