Mind Your Language

Punctuation is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling. It is said to be governed two-thirds by rule and one-third by personal taste.

As I take to understanding the nuances of LAW (Light, Air, Water!!!), Lynne Truss' book was like one of those ready reckoner books that I've grown to like more and more each day. She alludes to punctuation marks as traffic signals of language: "they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop."

Growing up, apart from the great show, 'Mind Your Language', I remember one of my sister's friend always interrupting her by saying, "PUNCTUATION', as she would speak ever so hastily. Finally figured it out why! Excerpts (or rather my favourite parts) follow:

Consider this:

Dear Jack,
I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we're apart. I can be forever happy - will you let me be yours?

Jill

or

Dear Jack,

I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people who are like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men I yearn! For you I have no feelings whatsoever. When we're apart I can be forever happy. Will you let me be?
Yours,

Jill

On procrastination, Lynne writes:

If you've similarly always wanted to know where to use an apostrophe (just like you want to know how to spell 'Connecticut'), it means you never will, doesn't it? If only because it's so extremely easy to find out.

THE TRACTABLE APOSTROPHE

• It indicates a possessive in a singular noun: A's PJ
• It indicates time or quantity: In three month's time, everything changed.
• It indicates the omission of figures in dates: The winter of '06
• It indicates plurals of letters and words: How many f's are there in Finland? What are the do's and don't's?

There are no absolute rights and wrongs in the matter of whether or not to write 'Lynne Truss' book' or 'Lynne Truss's book'.

THAT'LL DO, COMMA

• For lists: I love Goran, Marat, Chris and Lance. Notice that I've omitted the Oxford comma (i.e the comma before 'and'), the usage basically differs across the Atlantic, with the americans preferring to leave it in.
• For joining two complete sentences using such conjunctions as and, or, but, while and yet: The boys wanted to study until midnight, but they grew tired and fell asleep.
• For filling gaps: A had dark hair; H, fair.
• Before direct speech.
• For setting off interjections: Stop, ot I'll scream.
• In pairs to mark both ends of a weak interruption to a sentence or a piece of additional information: John Keats, who never did any harm to anyone, is often invoked by grammarians.

AIRS AND GRACES

We use a semicolon between two related sentences where there is no conjunction such as "and" or "but", and where a comma would be ungrammatical.

I remember him when he couldn't write his own name on a gate; now he's Prime Minister.

It has been rightly called "a compliment from the writer to the reader'. The sub-text of a semicolon is, "Now this is a hint. The elements of this sentence, although grammatically distinct, are actually elements of a single notion."

The semicolon also calls a bunch of brawling commas to attention.

Fares were offered to Corfu, the Greek island; Morocco; Elba, in the Mediterranean; and Paris.

Linking words such as "however", "nevetheless', 'also', 'consequently' and 'hence' requires a semicolon too.

He woke up in his bed; nevertheless, he was OK.

The colon is used to introduce long quotes and to link two sentences in order to show a co-relation (read because).

Stripy locked himself in the shed : England lost to Argentina.

CUTTING A DASH

An exclamation mark is used in involunatry ejaculations (Phew!), to salute or invoke, to exclaim or admire, for drama, to make a commonplace sentence more emphatic ("I could really do with some HJ!") or to deflect potential misunderstanding of irony: "I don't mean it!"

Italics are the print equivalent of underlining, and they are used for:

• titles of books, newspapers, albums and films.
• emphasis of certain words
• foreign words and phrases
• examples when writing about language

"This is the british style of using double quotation marks".

"This is the american style."

A single dash creates a dramatic disjunction which can be exploited for humour, for pathos, for shock.

He was - I still can't believe this! - trting to climb in the window.

The brackets, in writing, lift up a section of a sentence, holding it a foot or two above the rest.

Robert wasn't dead yet (he was still suing peolpe)

Square brackets are most commonly used around the word sic (from the Latin sicut, meaning "just as"), to explain the status of an apparent mistake.

The marginal direction to printers is "STET" (meaning "let it stand" and cancelling an alteration).

Lynne alludes to the ellipsis(…) as the black hole of the punctuation world. It is used to

• Indicate words missing … from a quoted passage.
• Trail off in an intriguing manner…
  

Woodrow Wilson once said that the hyphen was the most un-American thing in the world (note the hyphen required in “un-American”).Traditionally it joins together words, or words-with-prefixes, to aid understanding; it keeps certain other words neatly apart, with an identical intention. Also, it links two nouns like the Delhi-Dd bus.

Finally, something on e-writing. She thanks God that her system of punctuation was produced in the age of printing which has evolved slowly because of printing’s innate conservatism and goes on to say, “Picking up the book in the first place entails an active pursuit of understanding.”

As for colour coding, which I do too, she reiterates that it is to redouble the expressive force of words. She laments the fact that now nobody really knows that if the contraction of a title still ended with the original final letter – thus “Mr” for “Mister”, or “Fr” for “Father” – no full stop was required , whereas if the title was cut short – “Prof” for “Professor” or “M” for “Monsieur” – a full stop was essential.

She quotes a study which showed that e-mail increased employee’s productivity by 1.8 hours a day because they took less time to formulate their thoughts while they lost 2.2 hours of productivity because they were e-mailing so many jokes to their spouses, parents and stockbrokers. Of course, the emoticon has a special mention as being the greatest (or most desperate) advance in punctuation since the question mark in the reign of Charlemagne.

What a blog post?!
That’s an interrobang, invented in 1962, but pushed into oblivion since then.

So what I am trying to say is, “Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.”