Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation

by Lynne Truss

  I recently heard of someone studying the ellipsis (or three dots) for a PhD. And, I have to say, I was horrified. The ellipsis is the black hole of the punctuation universe, surely, into which no right-minded person would willingly be sucked, for three years, with no guarantee of a job at the end. But at least when this thesis is complete, it may tell us whether rumours are true, and that Mrs Henry Wood’s “Dead … and never called me mother!” (in the stage version of East Lynne) was really the first time it was used. Newspapers sometimes use the ellipsis interchangeably with a dash … which can be quite irritating … as its proper uses are quite specific, and very few:

  1 To indicate words missing … from a quoted passage

  2 To trail off in an intriguing manner…

  Which is always a good way to end anything, of course – in an intriguing manner. When you consider the power of erotic suggestion contained in the traditional three-dot chapter ending (“He swept her into his arms. She was powerless to resist. All she knew was, she loved him …”), it’s a bit of a comedown for the ellipsis to be used as a sub-species of the dash. Perhaps the final word on the ellipsis should go to Peter Cook in this Pete and Dud sketch from BBC2’s Not Only But Also in 1966. (My memory was that the title of this show contained an ellipsis itself, being Not Only … But Also, but in modern references the ellipsis has been removed, which only goes to show you can’t rely on anything any more.) Anyway, Peter Cook’s musing on the significance of the three dots is quite as good a philosophical moment as Tom Stoppard’s critics Moon and Bird-boot in The Real Inspector Hound arguing about whether you can start a play with a pause. Pete is explaining to Dud how a bronzed pilot approaches a woman on a dusty runway in Neville Shute’s A Town Like Alice – a woman whose perfectly defined “busty substances” have been oudined underneath her frail poplin dress by a shower of rain and then the “tremendous rushing wind” from his propellers:

  DUD: What happened after that, Pete?

  PETE: Well, the bronzed pilot goes up to her and they walk away, and the chapter ends in three dots.

  DUD: What do those three dots mean, Pete?

  PETE: Well, in Shute’s hands, three dots can mean anything.

  DUD: How’s your father, perhaps?

  PETE: When Shute uses three dots it means, “Use your own imagination. Conjure the scene up for yourself.” (Pause) Whenever I see three dots I feel all funny.

  *

  A Little Used Punctuation Mark

  One of the most profound things ever said about punctuation came in an old style guide of the Oxford University Press in New York. “If you take hyphens seriously,” it said, “you will surely go mad.” And it’s true. Just look how the little blighter escaped all previous categorisation until I had to hunt it down on its own for this teeny-weeny, hooked-on, afterthought-y chapter. It’s a funny old mark, the hyphen. Always has been. People have argued for its abolition for years: Woodrow Wilson said the hyphen was “the most un-American thing in the world” (note the hyphen required in “un-American”); Churchill said hyphens were “a blemish, to be avoided wherever possible”. Yet there will always be a problem about getting rid of the hyphen: if it’s not extra-marital sex (with a hyphen), it is perhaps extra marital sex, which is quite a different bunch of coconuts. Phrases abound that cry out for hyphens. Those much-invoked examples of the litde used car, the superfluous hair remover, the pickled herring merchant, the slow moving traffic and the two hundred odd members of the Conservative Party would all be lost without it.

  The name comes from the Greek, as usual. What a lot of words the Greeks had for explaining spatial relationships – for placing round, placing underneath, joining together, cutting off! Lucky for us, otherwise we would have had to call our punctuation marks names like “joiner” and “half a dash” and so on. In this case, the phrase from which we derive the name hyphen means “under one” or “into one” or “together”, so is possibly rather more sexy in its origins than we might otherwise have imagined from its utilitarian image today. Traditionally it joins together words, or words-with-prefixes, to aid understanding; it keeps certain other words neatly apart, with an identical intention. Thus the pickled-herring merchant can hold his head high, and the coat-tail doesn’t look like an unpronounceable single word. And all thanks to the humble hyphen.

  The fate of the hyphen is of course implicated in a general change occurring in the language at the moment, which will be discussed in the next chapter: the astonishing and quite dangerous drift back to the scriptio continua of the ancient world, by which words are just hoicked together as “all one word” with no initial capitals or helpful punctuation – the only good result of which being that if books manage to survive more than the next twenty years or so, younger readers will have no trouble reading James Joyce, since unhyphenated poetic compounds like “snotgreen” and “scrotumtightening” will look perfectly everyday. Email addresses are inuring us to this trend, as are advertisements on the internet (“GENTSROLEXWATCH!”), and when I received an invitation to a BBC launch for an initiative called “soundstart”, I hardly blinked an eye. In the old days, we used to ask the following question a lot: “One word? Two words? Hyphenated?” With astonishing speed, the third alternative is just disappearing, and I have heard that people with double-barrelled names are simply unable to get the concept across these days, because so few people on the other end of a telephone know what a hyphen is. As a consequence they receive credit cards printed with the name “Anthony Armstrong, Jones”, “Anthony Armstrong’Jones”, or even “Anthony Armstrong Hyphen”.

  Where should hyphens still go, before we sink into a depressing world that writes, “Hellohowareyouwhatisthisspacebarthingforanyidea”? Well, there are many legitimate uses for the hyphen:

  1 To prevent people casting aspersions at herring merchants who have never touched a drop in their lives. Many words require hyphens to avoid ambiguity: words such as “co-respondent”, “reformed”, “re-mark”. A reformed rock band is quite different from a reformed one. Likewise, a long-standing friend is different from a long standing one. A cross-section of the public is quite different from a cross section of the public. And one could go on. Carefully placed hyphens do not always save the day, however, as I recently had good reason to learn. Writing in The Daily Telegraph about the state of modern punctuation, I alluded to a “newspaper style-book” – carefully adding the hyphen to ensure the meaning was clear (I wasn’t sure people had heard of style books). And can you believe it? Two people wrote to complain! I had hyphenated wrongly, they said (with glee). Since there was no such thing as a newspaper style-book, I must really have intended “newspaper-style book”. I’ll just say here and now that I’ve rarely been more affronted. “What is a newspaper-style book, then?” I yelled. “Tell me what a newspaper-style book would look like when it’s at home!” I still have not got over this.

  2 It is still necessary to use hyphens when spelling outnumbers, such as thirty-two, forty-nine.

  3 When linking nouns with nouns, such as the London-Brighton train; also adjectives with adjectives: American-French relations. Typesetters and publishers use a short dash, known as an en-rule, for this function.

  4 Though it is less rigorously applied than it used to be, there is a rule that when a noun phrase such as “stainless steel” is used to qualify another noun, it is hyphenated, as “stainless-steel kitchen”. Thus you have corrugated iron, but a corrugated-iron roof. The match has a second half, but lots of second-half excitement. Tom Jones was written in the 18th century, but is an 18th-century novel. The train leaves at seven o’clock; it is the seven-o’clock train.

  5 Certain prefixes traditionally require hyphens: un-American, anti-Apartheid, pro-hyphens, quasi-grammatical.

  6 When certain words are to be spelled out, it is customary to use hyphens to indicate that you want the letters enunciated (or pictured) separately: “K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M”.

  7 Purely for expediency, the hyphen is used to avoid an unpleasant linguistic condi
tion called “letter collision”. However much you might want to create compound words, there will always be some ghastly results, such as “deice” (de-ice) or “shelllike” (shelllike).

  8 One of the main uses of the hyphen, of course, is to indicate that a word is unfinished and continues on the next line. Ignorance about where to split words has reached quite scary proportions, but thankfully this isn’t the place to go into it. I’ll just say that it’s “pains-]taking” and not “pain-]staking”.

  9 Hesitation and stammering are indicated by hyphens: “I reached for the w-w-w-watering can.”

  10 When a hyphenated phrase is coming up, and you are qualifying it beforehand, it is necessary to write, “He was a two-or three-year-old.”

  Even bearing all these rules in mind, however, one can’t help feeling that the hyphen is for the chop. Fowler’s Modern English Usage as far back as 1930 was advising that, “wherever reasonable”, the hyphen should be dropped, and the 2003 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English suggests that it is heading for extinction. American usage is gung-ho for compound words (or should that be gungho?), but a state of confusion reigns these days, with quite psychotic hyphenations arising in British usage, especially the rise of hyphens in phrasal verbs. “Time to top-up that pension,” the advertisements tell us. Uneducated football writers will aver that the game “kicked-off” at 3pm, and are not, apparently, ticked off afterwards. On the Times books website I see that Joan Smith “rounds-up” the latest crime fiction. But what if a writer wants his hyphens and can make a case for them? Nicholson Baker in his book The Size of Thoughts writes about his own deliberations when a well-intentioned copy-editor deleted about two hundred “innocent tinkertoy hyphens” in the manuscript of one of his books. American copy-editing, he says, has fallen into a state of “demoralised confusion” over hyphenated and unhyphenated compounds. On this occasion he wrote “stet hyphen” (let the hyphen stand) so many times in the margin that, in the end, he abbreviated it to “SH”.

  I stetted myself sick over the new manuscript. I stetted reenter (rather than reenter), postdoc (rather than postdoc), foot-pedal (rather than foot pedal), secondhand (rather than secondhand), twist-tie (rather than twist tie), and pleasure-nubbins (rather than pleasure nubbins).

  It is probably better not to inquire what “pleasure-nubbins” refers to here, incidentally, while still defending Baker’s right to hyphenate his pleasure-nubbins – yes, even all day, if he wants to.

  In the end, hyphen usage is just a big bloody mess and is likely to get messier. When you consider that fifty years ago it was correct to hyphenate Oxford Street as “Oxford-street”, or “tomorrow” as “tomorrow”, you can’t help feeling that prayer for eventual light-in-our-darkness may be the only sane course of action. Interestingly, Kingsley Amis says that those who smugly object to the hyphenation of the phrase “fine tooth-comb” are quite wrong to assert the phrase ought really to be punctuated “fine-tooth comb”. Evidently there really used to be a kind of comb called a tooth-comb, and you could buy it in varieties of fineness. Isn’t it a relief to know that? You learn something new every day.

  *

  Merely Conventional Signs

  On page 33 of the first-edition copy of Eric Partridge’s You Have a Point There that I have before me as I write (I borrowed it from the University of London Library), there is a marginal note made by a reader long ago. A marginal note? Yes, and I have been back to check and muse on it several times. Partridge, who is just about to elucidate the 17th application of the comma (“Commas in Fully Developed Complex Sentences”), is explaining that in this particular case it is difficult to formulate a set of rigid rules. “My aim is to be helpful, not dogmatic,” he explains. “The following examples will, if examined and pondered, supply the data from which any person of average intelligence can, without strain, assimilate an unformulated set of working rules.” At which the unknown, long-ago reader has written in old-fashioned handwriting up the side, “Rot! You lazy swine Partridge.”

  There are two reasons why I have borne this ballpoint outburst in mind while writing this book. One is that if Eric Partridge wasn’t comprehensive enough for some people, there is obviously naff-all chance for me. But there is also the fact that this startling effusion has lain within the pages of You Have a Point There possibly for fifty years, which is as long as the book itself has been a book. And this makes me wistful. The future of books is a large subject and perhaps this is not a suitable place to pursue it. We hear every day that the book is dead and that even the dimmest child can find “anything” on the internet. Yet I’m afraid I have to stick my small oar in because – as I hope has become clear from the foregoing chapters – our system of punctuation was produced in the age of printing, by printers, and is reliant on the ascendancy of printing to survive. Our punctuation exists as a printed set of conventions; it has evolved slowly because of printing’s innate conservatism; and is effective only if readers have been trained to appreciate the nuances of the printed page. The good news for punctuation is that the age of printing has been glorious and has held sway for more than half a millennium. The bad news for punctuation, however, is that the age of printing is due to hold its official retirement party next Friday afternoon at half-past five.

  “I blame all the emails and text messages,” people say, when you talk about the decline in punctuation standards. Well, yes. The effect on language of the electronic age is obvious to all, even though the process has only just begun, and its ultimate impact is as yet unimaginable.

  “I write quite differently in emails,” people say, with a look of inspired and happy puzzlement – a look formerly associated only with starry-eyed returnees from alien abduction. “Yes, I write quite differently in emails, especially in the punctuation. I feel it’s OK to use dashes all the time, and exclamation marks. And those dot, dot, dot things!”

  “Ellipsis, “I interject.

  “I can’t seem to help it!” they continue. “It’s as if I’ve never heard of semicolons! Dot, dot, dot! And everyone’s doing the same!”

  This is an exciting time for the written word: it is adapting to the ascendant medium, which happens to be the most immediate, universal and democratic written medium that has ever existed. But it is all happening too quickly for some people, and we have to face some uncomfortable facts: for example, it is already too late to campaign for Heinz to add punctuation marks to the Alphabetti Spaghetti, in the hope that all will be well.

  Having grown up as readers of the printed word (and possibly even scribblers in margins), we may take for granted the processes involved in the traditional activity of reading – so let us remind ourselves. The printed word is presented to us in a linear way, with syntax supreme in conveying the sense of the words in their order. We read privately, mentally listening to the writer’s voice and translating the writer’s thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it. Picking up the book in the first place entails an active pursuit of understanding. Holding the book, we are aware of posterity and continuity. Knowing that the printed word is always edited, typeset and proofread before it reaches us, we appreciate its literary authority. Having paid money for it (often), we have a sense of investment and a pride of ownership, not to mention a feeling of general virtue.

  All these conditions for reading are overturned by the new technologies. Information is presented to us in a non-linear way, through an exponential series of lateral associations. The internet is a public “space” which you visit, and even inhabit; its product is inherently impersonal and disembodied. Scrolling documents is the opposite of reading: your eyes remain static, while the material flows past. Despite all the opportunities to “interact”, we read material from the internet (or CD-roms, or whatever) entirely passively because all the interesting associative thinking has already been done on our behalf. Electronic media are intrinsically ephemeral, are open to perpetual revision, and work quite strenuously against any sort of historical perception. The op
posite of edited, the material on the internet is unmediated, except by the technology itself. And having no price, it has questionable value. Finally, you can’t write comments in the margin of your screen to be discovered by another reader fifty years down the line.

  Having said all this, there is no immediate cause for panic. If the book is dying, then at least it is treating its loyal fans (and the bookshops) to an extravagant and extended swan song. But when we look around us at the state of literacy – and in particular at all those signs for “BOBS’ MOTORS” and “ANTIQUE,S” – it just has to be borne in mind that books are no longer the main vehicles for language in modern society, and that if our fate is in the hands of the barbarians, there is an observable cultural drift that can only make matters worse. As I mentioned in this book’s introduction, by tragic historical coincidence a period of abysmal under-educating in literacy has coincided with this unexpected explosion of global self-publishing. Thus people who don’t know their apostrophe from their elbow are positively invited to disseminate their writings to anyone on the planet stupid enough to double-click and scroll. Mark Twain said it many years ago, but it has never been more true:

  There is no such thing as “the Queen’s English”. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!

  Following the Equator, 1897

  It hurts, though. It hurts like hell. Even in the knowledge that our punctuation has arrived at its present state by a series of accidents; even in the knowledge that there are at least seventeen rules for the comma, some of which are beyond explanation by top grammarians – it is a matter for despair to see punctuation chucked out as worthless by people who don’t know the difference between who’s and whose, and whose bloody automatic “grammar checker” can’t tell the difference either. And despair was the initial impetus for this book. I saw a sign for “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it, and something deep inside me snapped; snapped with that melancholy sound you hear in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, like a far-off cable breaking in a mine-shaft. I know that language moves on. It has to. Not once have I ever stopped to feel sorry for those Egyptian hieroglyph artists tossed on the scrapheap during a former linguistic transition (“Birds’ heads in profile, mate? You having a laugh?”). But I can’t help feeling that our punctuation system, which has served the written word with grace and ingenuity for centuries, must not be allowed to disappear without a fight.