Making a Point

by David Crystal

  Most people would accept that quotation marks shouldn’t be used so much that a page begins to look fussy or cluttered. And some writers – such as Cormac McCarthy and NoViolet Bulawayo – take this principle to extremes, avoiding them altogether.

  But if you want to cut down on quotation marks, what are your alternatives?

  Interlude: A fashionable vulgarism

  Suspicion about scare quotes goes back a long way. In 1859, in its issue of 4 June, Mr Punch attacked what he called a ‘fashionable vulgarism’:

  The following is an example of a style of fashionable announcement lately grown customary:--

  “LADY PAKINGTON ‘received’ last evening, at the official residence of the First Lord of the Admiralty.”

  Observe that “receive” is printed between inverted commas. Why? The question may be answered by a quotation from the poetry of the lower orders:--

  “JOSEPH BUGGINS ‘guv’ a party”

  The inverted commas in the foregoing line serve to mark the word “guv” as the vulgar preterite tense of the verb “to give.” In the same way, perhaps, those which enclose the term “received” are meant to stigmatise it as a verb active, which ought to govern an accusative case expressed, but which only does govern an accusative case understood; that accusative case to be conjectured from its obviousness, in a spirit of candour. We know that LADY PAKINGTON received company. There are ladies who receive stolen goods – for example. These considerations should prevent a refined journalist from putting the word “received” in inverted commas after the name of a lady.

  32

  Graphics and italics

  The previous chapter completes the account of the traditional set of punctuation marks, but the story of punctuation is not yet over. Several minor marks have to be noted, along with proposals for new marks. I also need to reflect on the fascinating things people do with punctuation, from the usefully ingenious to the weirdly eccentric. And there’s an important overlap with other features of orthography that needs to be explored.

  To begin with the overlap. In addition to punctuation, the orthographic system of a language includes spelling, capitalization, layout, and typography, and these should never be seen in isolation from each other. Punctuation interacts with each. Hyphens and apostrophes have a role to play in spelling. Initial capitals complement periods in identifying sentences. Strings of CAPITALS provide an alternative to other ways of showing emphasis. Sequences of initial capitals can express Very Special Points. Spacing is a critical feature in paragraph identity. And typographic features offer alternative solutions to some of the semantic and pragmatic problems recounted in earlier chapters.

  The previous chapter illustrated one such problem: how do we reduce the burden placed on quotation marks, which have such a wide range of functions that usage is often ambiguous. My example was ‘Great “reductions”,’ where the scare quotes convey a scepticism that diverts the reader from the writer’s aim, which was simply to emphasize and focus attention. Replacing the marks by a distinctive typeface provides a solution. There are several possibilities:

  italics: Great reductions

  bold: Great reductions

  underlining: Great reductions

  small capitals: Great REDUCTIONS

  full capitals: Great REDUCTIONS

  combinations of the above: Great reductions, Great REDUCTIONS …

  And, of course, colour, type size, font changes, and the creative positioning of the words and letters add many further options. In the nineteenth century, these would all be exploited: typographical variety was the norm. A concert poster or book announcement, for example, would have every line in a different setting, as illustrated on p. 320 by the title page of The Yorkshire Garland (1825). This kind of typesetting is rare today. Graphic designers prefer simplicity, and amateur website designers – awed by the dozens of graphic options made available online – are warned to be sparing in their selection of typefaces.

  All of these options are part of our everyday encounter with the professional graphic world, online and offline; but when it comes to everyday writing at home or in school, what we do is much reduced. Handwriting routinely allows only underlining (straight and wriggly) and capitalization (of various sizes), though of course with special effort we can add colour and other features if we think it appropriate. These were also the only features available in old-style typewriting – with the additional constraint that wriggly underlining was impossible and capitals were of a single size. Writing on screen in theory offers all typographic possibilities, but most writers don’t use more than the easy options provided by their keyboards, where underlining and capitalization are supplemented by italics and boldface. These four features are part of daily life for Internet users, though, so it’s important that people become aware of the conventions and pitfalls surrounding their use. In particular, the function of italics (or italic, in traditional British terminology) overlaps with that of quotation marks, and requires separate consideration.

  The use of italics originates in a medieval handwriting style, and has in its long history developed a remarkable range of functions, not all of which are easy to formulate as rules. Practice has altered over the centuries, with printers and publishers adding one change here, another change there, and making decisions about usage on the basis of reasoning that has long since been forgotten. A publisher’s style guide will tell us, for example, that titles of books are to be in italics – but not the titles of sacred texts, such as the Bible or the books it contains. The names of newspapers seem to vary capriciously: we see the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph, but The Times and The Economist. ‘As a rule, print the definite article in roman’, says Horace Hart in his Rules for Oxford University Press, but he allows the exceptions on the grounds that ‘those publications prefer to have it so’. When pragmatic considerations outweigh semantic ones, the stage is set for widespread uncertainty.

  The basic function of italics is clear enough: to make a word or phrase stand out from the surrounding text, either for emphasis or to distinguish it from other words with which it might be confused.

  emphasizing: ‘there was a third man’ [carrying Harry Lime across the street]

  distinguishing: ‘adjective is a noun’ [totally confusing without the italics]

  But this apparently simple principle goes in a bewildering number of directions.

  It is unproblematic in cases like these:

  citing a linguistic form: ‘the past tense of go is went’

  first mention of a technical term: ‘This is known as a stamen. The stamen has to be …’

  identifying an individual letter or number: ‘draw a line between a and b’, ‘Her name is Catherine with a C’, ‘he needed a 3 to win’.

  naming a vehicle, such as a ship, train, or spacecraft: ‘Voyager has reached the outer planets’, ‘he served on HMS Renown’ [the prefix is not italicized, because it isn’t part of the ship’s name]

  giving a technical Latin name to plants or animals: ‘a fine display of primula vulgaris’ [primroses]

  giving directions in a dramatic or musical performance: ‘Enter Hamlet’, ‘ff’ [fortissimo]

  There are also several technical contexts where it is standard practice to use italics, such as in algebra (‘x + y’), physics (‘the constant c’), medicine (‘symptoms of E. coli’), and law (‘as seen in Smith v Brown 1930’). Even here, though, there may be divided usage: we will find both ‘Smith v Brown’ and ‘Smith v Brown’.

  Uncertainty over usage is more of a problem in the two most frequently encountered cases of italics: work-titles and loanwords. In each case, the principle seems straightforward on first sight, but presents problems in application. Take titles. The basic idea is that the title of a large work should be in italics, and sections of a work in quotation marks. So we find:

  Chapter 13 of his English Grammar is headed simply ‘Coordination’.

  Titles of books, journals, newspapers, operas, plays, films, computer ga
mes, and other major works all have italics in traditional publishing. But what counts as a major work on radio and television? If the programme is a series, then it would seem to work like a book, so I’d expect to see The Simpsons and The Archers, with individually named episodes in quotation marks. That allows us to say, should we need to:

  ‘The New Moon’ is an episode of The New Moon.

  But should the title of a one-off ten-minute programme be in italics? Is that a ‘major work’? And in literature, if titles of novels are italicized and titles of short stories are in quotation marks, what do we do with novellas? And does the name of a comic strip warrant italics?

  The principle is also affected by perspective. Titles of large works can form part of a hierarchy, and lose their ‘largeness’ when seen in the context of something larger. This next example follows the expected pattern:

  The first section of The Waste Land is headed ‘The burial of the dead’.

  But what do we do if we go a level up? Should it be (a) or (b)?

  (a) In T S Eliot’s Collected Poems, we find The Waste Land.

  (b) In T S Eliot’s Collected Poems, we find ‘The Waste Land’.

  Further context can push us in the direction of (c) rather than the apparently inconsistent (d):

  (c) In T S Eliot’s Collected Poems, we find ‘The Waste Land’ and ‘Eyes that last I saw in tears’.

  (d) In T S Eliot’s Collected Poems, we find The Waste Land and ‘Eyes that last I saw in tears’.

  A similar uncertainty applies in the case of loanwords. Here the principle is to use italics if a borrowed word is new, arcane, or ‘looks foreign’. So we would expect to find accented words italicized, such as vis-à-vis and élan. But how long does a loanword have to be in English before it stops ‘looking foreign’?

  déjà vu, deja vu, déjà vu, deja vu

  There is no rule about the time it takes to anglicize a word. The more widely it is used, the sooner the italics will be dropped. We rarely see italics these days in such words as:

  guru, fatwa, terminus, status quo, tai chi, cul-de-sac

  But in recent days newspapers have presented me with:

  doyen, conversatione, wunderkind, oeuvre, nom de plume

  Longer phrases (terminus ad quem, je ne sais quoi, deus ex machina) tend to retain the italics, especially if there is a possible pronunciation confusion (double entendre, agent provocateur). Learnèd and specialized terms (schadenfreude, weltanschauung) will take longer to lose them, but even here it all depends on familiarity. Readers of a psychology journal might not expect to see gestalt italicized, but if the term turns up in an art journal it probably would be. Those who know the worlds of batik and singspiel well may find the terms so familiar that they no longer use italics, whereas outsiders would still find them strange. This is a domain full of ‘probablys’, ‘mays’, and ‘mights’.

  Fashions have changed greatly over the centuries, and are still changing. We no longer use italics to show direct speech, as was common practice in the sixteenth century. Nor do we use them for proper names, as seen in Shakespeare’s First Folio:

  Renew, renew, the fierce Polidamus

  Hath beate downe Menon: bastard Margarelon

  Hath Doreus prisoner. (Troilus and Cressida, 5.5.6)

  Commonly used Latin abbreviations (such as i.e., op. cit., ibid., viz., e.g.) were usually printed in italics in the nineteenth century, but Horace Hart recommended romanizing them, apart from c (= circa), and we rarely see them italicized today.

  Italics gave the printers several headaches in relation to punctuation. What should they do if writers wanted to cite a book title within a piece of text that is already in italics, as in a stage direction? Some sort of distinction needs to be made, to avoid ambiguity or unintentional humour:

  Smith enters the room carrying David Copperfield.

  They decided to reverse the process, putting the title in roman type – though not everyone found the aesthetic result palatable, preferring quotation marks instead:

  Smith enters the room carrying David Copperfield.

  Smith enters the room carrying ‘David Copperfield’.

  And what should they do if writers italicized a noun, but wanted to pluralize it or give it a possessive? Should the -s be in italics too?

  (a) the Renown’s engines or the Renown’s engines?

  (b) the Renowns of this period or the Renowns of this period?

  Semantic reasoning suggests the second, as the inflection is not a part of the name. Pragmatic reasoning (avoiding an awkward juxtaposition of fonts) suggests the first. Both will be seen. And a similar question was raised by accompanying punctuation marks, in cases such as these:

  (Troilus and Cressida, 5.5.6)

  doyen, conversatione, wunderkind, oeuvre, nom de plume

  The commas and parentheses are in roman type, which is recommended practice – again, on semantic grounds, as the punctuation is part of the discourse, not the individual words. But the alternatives will nonetheless be seen, especially online, where many writers see no point in spending time and energy making a typeface change that is unlikely to be noticed. And in handwriting, of course, the distinction disappears behind the idiosyncrasies of personal hands.

  Different graphic mediums present writers with different options, not all of which are mutually translatable. Italics are difficult to replicate in handwriting, and so alternative means must be found to capture their linguistic functions – usually by means of a straight underline. But handwriting does things that traditional and online printing does not routinely allow, such as multiple underlining in cases of emphasis. Similarly, it is not always possible to equate the typographic features of traditional and electronic printing: hyphenation practices differ, for example, and the kinds of distinction beloved of printers (such as em vs en dashes and small vs large capitals) are generally absent online.

  The Internet is a major factor in present-day change. Italic script is slightly less easy to read than roman, and slows reading speed, so long stretches of text in italics tend to be avoided other than in special circumstances (such as an extended stage direction in a play script). But even short pieces of text can be affected on the computer screen, where resolution is lower. Boldface or colour is more visible, so we often see these features replacing items that in traditional publishing would be in italics. And we also see the italic convention dispensed with altogether. ‘HMS Renown’ and ‘primula vulgaris’ are likely to appear online with no italics at all. The electronic world is making us rethink several traditional practices in relation to punctuation, and offering fresh opportunities.

  33

  Punctuating the Internet

  A brave new world that has no punctuation in it? That is the myth which developed in the early days of electronic communication, when people saw emails and chatroom exchanges lacking standard punctuation – and sometimes with no punctuation at all. But it has turned out to be only a fraction of the story.

  To begin with, alongside punctuation minimalism, there is punctuation maximalism, where we see more marks than would be found in traditional handwriting or printing. The trend is facilitated by keyboard technology: simply by holding a key (other than a letter or numeral) down, we can generate an indefinite string of symbols, thus allowing exchanges such as:

  will we see you at the party???????

  yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  This is not the first time repeated symbols have been used in English – they were always an option in informal letter-writing – but they have never been used so extensively. And the practice extends idiosyncratically to symbols that were never used in sequence before, such as >>>>>>>> and ((((((((((. The meaning of such sequences only becomes clear by looking at the context – and not always then.

  The minimalist trend has its predecessors too, as we saw in earlier chapters with such writers as Cormac McCarthy (Chapter 11), and of course the earliest English writing was most minimalist of all, with its almost total lack of punctuation marking.
What Internet users have done, largely by instinct, is make a connection with writing in its most primitive state. They’ve been able to do it because, for the first time since the Middle Ages, they have available a medium which allows writing to appear in the public domain without the intervention of the cadre of professionals whose job it is to maintain consistency in Standard English – editors, copy-editors, and proof-readers. When writing a blog online, nobody is looking over your shoulder.

  For punctuation, the scenario is unprecedented and can be unnerving, as Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon observe in their influential Wired Style (1999):

  If you’re writing on or about the Net, prepare for a clash of cultures – between copy editors and coders. The first live by the book, faithful to every mechanical rule; the second live by the keyboard, wildly appropriating every punctuation symbol in ASCII. Online, publishing meets programming – and punctuation leads a double life.

  The situation is no longer as dramatic as Hale and Scanlon suggest. They were writing in the late 90s, when the Internet was still a novelty to most people, and all kinds of weird practices were being experimented with as users struggled to come to terms with what the technology was allowing them to do. Things have settled down a lot since then. Apart from anything else, the online demographic has risen sharply. It’s no longer solely a young person’s medium. And as the average age of users rises, so conservative linguistic practices become more evident.