WRITING: Punctuation

I am outright stealing a post from Jerz’s Literacy Log because it is a subject near and dear to my heart, the semicolon. Here then, from The Telegraph, is Oliver Pritchett’s Review of Lynne Truss’ book, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves:

“Oliver Pritchett reviews Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss

I have always had a great affection for the semicolon; it has a certain discreet charm. On the other hand, there is just one word to describe the colon: bossy. A colon says: “Pay attention, this next bit is really important.” If the colon is a fanfare, the semicolon is more like a polite cough. It is a nasty shock to discover that it has enemies. Gertrude Stein, who might, in her time, have been considered a bit of a bossyboots herself, suggested that semicolons were simply commas with pretensions.

Others have even claimed that semicolons were middle class. (I was tempted to put an exclamation mark at the end of the last sentence to draw attention to the absurdity of the notion, but good manners restrained me.) As Lynne Truss says in this witty, clear-headed and altogether enchanting book, “If they are middle class, I’m a serviette.” (Continued)

This is not just another of those grammarians’ gripes about greengrocers, and, in spite of the reference in the title to zero tolerance, Lynne Truss remains utterly good-natured throughout. She says she is not a pedant, but a stickler – which is a description that many of us would be happy to adopt. She does say that people who put an apostrophe in the wrong place, when they ought to know better, deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave, but it’s probably mostly in fun. Although she is given to the occasional expression of fierce bravado, I suspect that she is civil to her greengrocer.

This is a celebration of punctuation, full of jokes and anecdotes and information. It also introduces us to a new hero, and, as a fitting act of deference, I am going to put down a colon before writing his name: Aldus Manutius the Elder. This Venetian printer, who lived from 1450 to 1515, was the inventor of the italic typeface and also the first to use the semicolon.

I should mention that Eats, Shoots and Leaves is also extremely helpful to anyone who is looking for guidance about commas, brackets, dashes and the rest of them, and who is perhaps intimidated by the whole business. Most of all, it makes you love punctuation; you want to conserve what is still left and perhaps even call for more of it. Is it time to campaign for the British to adopt the Spanish upside-down question mark, which appears as an advance warning of a sentence with a query in it? Should we demand more tildes?

Reading this book put me in such a good mood that I came close to taking a wishy-washy liberal view and almost forgiving the people who use that modern punctuation atrocity, the “forward slash”. This is the one that is so beloved by presenters of Radio 4 programmes when they nag you to visit their website. It makes me feel like hurling potato’s (sic) at the radio.” © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003