The Word Snoop

by Ursula Dubosarsky

  Still, it’s certainly true that punctuation can sometimes help make the meaning of something clearer. The Word Snoop remembers the time she came home from school, and found this note left on the fridge door by her auntie:

  Yum! I thought, picturing all those undisappointingly delicious ice-cream cakes inside. But when I opened the fridge door, I realized that my auntie actually meant:

  Hmmph! I should’ve written under the note, I’m so disappointed I want to eat Auntie. Oops, I mean, I’m so disappointed. I want to eat, Auntie!

  But luckily this kind of confusion happens far less often than you might think. And sometimes, when it does happen, it could be that the writer meant both things anyway—after all, writers just love double meanings and puns.

  In the end, as with most things to do with language, writers will make different choices about punctuation because they think differently about sentences and words. It’s part of the personality of their writing. William Shakespeare, for example, used almost eight times as many colons : in his seventeenth-century plays as we would nowadays, and in the eighteenth century, novelist Jane Austen used exclamation marks ! far more often than her fellow novelist Daniel Defoe. In the nineteenth century, Swedish playwright Henrik Ibsen used four times as many dashes — as the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Then in the twentieth century, dramatist John Galsworthy used four times as many semicolons ; as playwright Eugene O’Neill.

  So, as you can imagine, writers and editors, students and teachers can spend a lot of time arguing about punctuation, because sometimes there’s no “right” answer. The nineteenth-century Irish writer Oscar Wilde once reported that: “I was working on one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” (But what happened the day after that?)

  Some writers HATE punctuation. The eighteenth-century American entrepreneur Timothy Dexter hated it so much that he included a separate page of periods and commas in a booklet he published. He said that readers who needed them were welcome to sprinkle them about wherever they wanted, like salt and pepper, but he wasn’t going to put them in himself.

  Then again, other writers LOVE punctuation. The seventeenth-century English writer Ben Jonson loved punctuation so much, he even added a colon between his first and last names—Ben:Jonson. (Nobody has ever figured out why exactly . . .) And when the noble German poet Goethe lay dying in 1832, he was seen to trace out words with his fingers, being very careful to include the correct punctuation marks.

  It’s hard to know whether Irishman James Joyce loved or hated punctuation. There is a whole chapter in his novel Ulysses with almost no punctuation at all, except right at the very end where he put—you guessed it—a period.

  Whether you love or hate punctuation, maybe the best advice is just to enjoy it. It can even make you laugh. The Danish entertainer Victor Borge did a very funny comedy sketch called “Phonetic Punctuation,” where he made up a different wacky sound for each punctuation mark—for an em-dash, a colon, an exclamation mark, and so on. See if you can track down a recording of it (on the Internet, perhaps?).

  I have to confess that I love punctuation. I love everything about it, even when people tell me I’ve got it all wrong! It would make me very sad if punctuation disappeared from our sentences. After all, punctuation has been around for more than a thousand years—the page would look undressed without it. Enjoy it, play with it, think about it, use it. It belongs to the language, and it belongs to you.

  Happy punctuating!

  ! or ?

  If you think about it, a single punctuation mark can carry a lot of meaning. Have you ever seen the episode of the TV sitcom Seinfeld, where one of the characters, Elaine, gets extremely upset with a friend who writes down a phone message and fails to add an exclamation mark at the end? And I bet you’ve sent an e-mail or text message with just a ! or a ? once in a while. Actually, back in the nineteenth century, long before texting was even thought of, the French writer Victor Hugo was worried about whether anyone would like his new novel, Les Miserables. He is said to have sent a message to his publisher containing only one thing, a question mark: ? The publisher sent him back a note with a single exclamation mark: !

  Hey Word Snoops, over here! How did you do with the last code? See if you can crack this one I made up using my keyboard.

  (Hint: ‘*% ;}%!_. ?[”$ ;{}}[ = The sneaky Word Snoop)

  Dear Snoops,

  I’m going to ask you all to close your eyes,

  take a deep breath, and relax. (Hey, don’t go

  to sleep!) Now think back to when you were

  first learning to write your own name. How

  important and mysterious the letters seemed,

  each with its own special shape and sound.

  Ever since writing began, people have been

  fascinated by the power of letters, and have

  played around with them in all sorts of unusual

  ways. Mixing them up, leaving them out, using

  them all at once—there are so many things you

  can do. The word for letter in ancient Greek

  is “gramma,” and you’ll see that word over

  and over again in this chapter with things like

  anagram, pangram and lipogram …

  What-a-gram???!!!

  Watch and wait, my dear snoops, and you’ll

  soon find out…

  Yours snoopfully,

  Doors went hop

  4.

  Letters, letters, letters

  Anagrams

  Have a look at these pairs of words:LEMON/MELON

  DANCE/CANED

  ELVIS/LIVES

  Look really hard at the letters. What do you notice about them? Well, in each pair, the two words are made up of exactly the same letters, they’ve just been arranged differently. This is called an anagram. The word comes from two ancient Greek words—ana, meaning “back” or “again,” and gramma,meaning “letter.” When you write the letters again in a different order, you get a whole new word.

  Anagrams are often found in puzzle books or crosswords. But ancient Greek philosophers, like Plato and Pythagoras, thought that anagrams were more than just for fun—they believed anagrams revealed hidden meanings in words.

  Later, mathematicians and scientists like Galileo used anagrams as a code. They would put their discoveries into anagrams, so they could keep them a secret until they were ready to tell the world.

  People have always enjoyed making anagrams out of their own names. An English mathematician, Augustus de Morgan, claimed to have made up about 800 anagrams from his name. King Louis XIII of France even had a Royal Anagrammatist, who would make anagrams of names on request. Twins sometimes have names that are anagrams of each other—like Tania and Anita, Claus and Lucas, or Ernie and Irene.

  I wonder if you can make up an anagram of your own name? It doesn’t have to be another name, it can be other words. An anagram of The Word Snoop, for example . . . Aha! Look back at the letter I wrote you at the start of this chapter and see if you can work it out . . .

  Writers love anagrams. Samuel Butler wrote a novel about an imaginary country called Erewhon—can you figure out where it is? And what about the land of Tribnia that the Irish writer Jonathan Swift invented in his book Gulliver’s Travels? And in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, there’s a very unpleasant character called Count Olaf, and another one named Al Funcoot, and another one called Dr. Flacutono, and another, Dr. O. Lucafont, and an even more unsavory medical couple, Dr. Tocuna and Nurse Flo . . .

  Until recently, to work out an anagram you had to write all the letters down on a page in different orders, or use letter tiles and mix them up to find another word. It can be really hard to do. But now there are special computer programs that make up anagrams from any words you type in.

  Still, it’s fun to do it the old-fashioned way. See if you can work out the anagrams on the following page—or better still, think up some for yourselves!
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br />   Anagrams

  1. Thorn, Shout, Seat, Stew (Hmm, which direction should we go?)

  2. Listen (Where did all the noise go?)

  3. Moon Starer (A student of the stars.)

  4. Here come dots (Great way to send a message.)

  5. The bear’s in (And he’s going to have a long, long nap . . . )

  Pangrams

  There’s something special about the following sentence:The five boxing wizards jump quickly.

  Can you figure out what it is? Remember, it’s all about letters . . .

  Give up?

  The answer is that it contains every letter of the alphabet—from A to Z. Have another look and check for yourself. Every single letter.

  These kinds of sentences are called pangrams, which comes from two ancient Greek words—pan, meaning “all,” and gramma,which you might remember means “letter.” People have been writing pangrams for centuries, and not only with the English alphabet. There are pangrams in the Hebrew Bible, as well as in ancient Greek literature, such as Homer’s Odyssey. And there’s a pangram in Japanese that’s more than a thousand years old—a poem called the Iroha.

  Pangrams became most common after typewriters were invented in the late nineteenth century. This is because a pangram is a very quick way to make sure that all the keys on a keyboard are working. The most famous of all pangrams—The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog—was developed for this specific reason.

  Pangrams are also a handy way of comparing all the letters in different fonts. Hmm, which do you prefer?

  or

  People are inventing new pangrams every day, just for the challenge. What’s called a “perfect” pangram is one that contains only 26 letters in total, but they’re very difficult to make up. Most pangrams contain many more letters than that.

  A game you can play (and it’s easier than inventing a pangram itself) is to write a story where each word begins with a different letter of the alphabet in order. To give you an idea, on the next page is one that the Word Snoop just made up.

  A black cat dreamt every fourth goose hunted invisible jellyfish. Kindly let many nice ostriches pass quickly. Rather stupidly the umbrella voted when x-raying yellow zebras.

  Why not try to make up your own crazy pangrammatic story?

  Lipograms

  I bet you’re wondering what a lipogram is. Um, a telegram with lips?

  It might help to think of a pangram, which as we know is a sentence containing every letter of the alphabet. A lipogram is more or less the opposite of this. Instead of including every letter, you deliberately leave out a particular letter. The word comes from ancient Greek—lipo, meaning “lacking,” and gramma,meaning—you guessed it—“letter.”

  Writing lipograms goes right back to at least the sixth century BC, when a Greek poet deliberately wrote verses where none of the words contained the letter S. This is called a lipogram on S. The question is—why did he do this?

  NOBODYKNOWS.

  In the eighteenth century, the German poet Gottlob Burmann apparently wrote 130 poems without the letter R—lipograms on R. He was even said to have avoided using any words with the letter R in his everyday speech! Try that—oops, I mean, attempt that!

  Okay, but why?

  DON’T ASKME.

  Of course, it’s easier to write a lipogram on a letter that is not very common, like Z or Q. It’s much much harder to write a lipogram on a letter like E, which is the most common letter in several languages, including English and French. Despite this, in 1939 Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a whole novel, Gadsby,without using a single E. He said that it was so difficult to write this book that he had to tie down the letter E on the keyboard of his typewriter to stop himself from using it. And following in his footsteps, in 1969 the French writer Georges Perec published a 300-page novel that also contained no E’s. It’s called La Disparition, which means “The Disappearance.” (Where did that E go?)

  But the question is—WHY? Why do writers even want to do these strange things? What’s wrong with just ordinary old sentences?

  Well, I suppose it’s because writers love language so much, they just want to play with it all day long to see what they can make it do, like making models out of clay. They are like experimenters in a laboratory. Hmm, they wonder, what would happen if I did this? Or this? Where would this take me?

  Do you think you could make up a lipogram? (Or should I say, DO YOU ACTUALLY WANT TO?) Well, the Word Snoop has given it a whirl. Take a look at the sentences on the opposite page and see if you can work out what sort of lipograms they are . . .

  Lipograms

  1. For many days following, all boys and girls who had brought lollipops for lunch got a gold star.

  2. I wonder why the huge octopus went to bed when the clock struck eleven?

  3. Under his hat, the magician secretly kept a fluffy teddy bear.

  Acronyms

  Acronyms

  WDYS?

  Acronyms

  ??

  GAFOFY!

  TFN

  YW TTYL

  NIICHI

  Did you understand this conversation? Would it help if I told you it’s written mainly in acronyms? Um, would it help if I told you what an acronym is?

  The word comes from two ancient Greek words—acro, meaning “top,” and onoma, meaning “name.” An acronym is an abbreviation of a phrase or sentence, where you use only the beginning letter or letters of the words to say what you mean. So in the conversation above, WDYS? stands for What Did You Say? and GAFOFY! stands for Go And Find Out For Yourself! Then it goes on: Thanks For Nothing. You’re Welcome. Talk To You Later. Not If I Can Help It. (Gee, NVF . . . I mean, Not Very Friendly.)

  These are the sorts of acronyms people use when texting a friend or talking in an Internet chat room. Internet slang languages, like LOL and Leet, are made up largely of acronyms. But acronyms have been around for thousands of years before the Internet was even invented.

  Way back in the empire of ancient Rome, acronyms were used for inscriptions in stone. This was sensible, as it saved a lot of space and time and also stopped your hand from getting sore from too much carving. Instead of having to write Pia Fidelis, meaning “pious and faithful,” the stone carver only had to put the letters PF and everyone knew what it meant. (Let’s hope so, anyway . . .) One of the most famous acronyms in all history, which was carved on many public monuments, is SPQR—SenatusPopulus queRomanus, the “Senate and the People of Rome.”

  Another acronym you may have heard of dates back to the second and third centuries AD. The early Christians used the very fishy word ICHTHUS to identify each other. It was an acronym of the Greek words Iesous Christos Theou Huios Soter, meaning “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” In this case, the acronym also spelled out the Greek word for “fish,” which is why the fish is still a symbol used by some Christians today.

  Acronyms are found in other religions too. In Islamic writing, you may see the acronym SAW written in brackets after the name of the Prophet Mohammed. It stands for the Arabic Salla Allahu alaihi Wa Sallam, meaning “peace be upon him.” And Catholic books and websites are full of Latin acronyms like AMDG (Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, “for the greater glory of God”) and DV (Deo Volente, “God willing”).

  In the Jewish religion acronyms were particularly popular in the Middle Ages. Some people believed the Hebrew letters themselves had mystical meanings, which made acronyms very special, and they were used in prayers and blessings and things like that. Important rabbis were even known by acronyms of their names—for example, the eleventh-century Jewish leader Rabbi Isaac Ben Asher was also called RIBA.

  But the real explosion in acronyms happened in the twentieth century. It was actually during World War Two (I mean, WWII) in the 1940s that the word acronymfirst started being widely used—and you can see why! The army had lots and lots of acronyms—not only for all the divisions and ranks of officers, but also for things like the COMAMPHIBFORSOPAC (Commander, Amphibious Force, South Pacific
). Phew! And let’s hope no one you know of was ever KDPOW (Killed or Died while a Prisoner Of War).

  After WWII, acronyms had become so fashionable it seemed almost every new organization had one—UNESCO, NATO, UNICEF, and many others. It was the same in the field of science and technology. New discoveries were being made all the time, and some words were so long and strange that it made sense to use acronyms. Let’s face it, DNA is much easier to say and remember than Deoxyribonucleic Acid.

  Not everybody liked all these acronyms, though. The English writer George Orwell certainly didn’t. In his novel set in the future called 1984 (well, that was the future way back then!), he invented a kind of language called New-speak, where the government used acronyms and abbreviations on purpose to hide what was really going on. Orwell had noticed that Nazi and Communist governments did this with some not-very-pleasant organizations like the SS (Schutz Staffel, “protective squad”) and the NKGB (Narodnyi Komissariat Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, “People’s Commissariat of State Security”). He thought once a government starts using a lot of acronyms, it was definitely BN (Bad News).

  But sometimes acronyms are JFF (Just For Fun). The novelist P. G. Wodehouse created a lovely, silly character called Bertie Wooster, who scattered ridiculous acronyms throughout his conversations, such as “I put my F in my H” (“I put my Face in my Hands”) or “In my humble O” (“In my humble Opinion”). These are more like the acronyms used in text messages, e-mails and chat rooms. In fact, IMHO is one of the most commonly used!