Noah's Archive: Mark My Word

A panda walks into a bar and orders a ham sandwich. After wolfing it down, he produces a handgun, fires a shot through the ceiling, and walks out, tossing a copy of Guide to Wildlife onto the bar. “I'm a panda,” he explains. The bartender opens the book to the page on pandas and reads: “Eats, shoots and leaves.”

The punchline of that old joke is the title of a new book in defense of punctuation. The author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Lynne Truss, writes that “it should come as no surprise that writers take an interest in punctuation.” It should come as no surprise that designers do too, for punctuation marks are as typographically valid as letters. Designers often love them as form, while resenting them as clutter. But they are essential clutter.

Design is, among other things, the craft of making exquisite distinctions. Punctuation is a tool for showing distinctions. The subtle differences between period, semicolon, and comma are not arbitrary assertions of grammatical bureaucracy; they render gradations of meaning visible.

Visibility is critical in poetry, an art of eye as well as ear, and poets have always been sensitive to the shape of type. The lowercase e.e. cummings performed marvelous acrobatics with parenthesis and commas, elevating punctuation marks to the lyrical height of his words. Commas in non-lyrical everyday writing are derided as fussy, even prissy and obsessively correct, like dotting every “i” and crossing every “t”. But they were as necessary as nails to the Filipino poet Jose Garcia Villa, who used them so abundantly he was called “the comma poet.” One of the poems in his book Have Come, Am Here, has no words at all, consisting entirely of commas.

Like other forms of government, punctuation has its rogue states. “The dash is nowadays seen as the enemy of grammar,” Truss tells us, “partly because overly disorganized thought is the mode of most email...” But the distrust of dashes predates email by decades. The dash—now so often confused with the hyphen that the two are used interchangeably—has been suspect as long as I can remember. My high school English teacher, Colonel Daub, warned us against it in the same sober hush he fell into when describing venereal disease and how to catch it. Scorning dashes, the Colonel thought he could ensure our scorn for them as well by telling us they were used chiefly by girls in letters to other girls. That gave me pause, but not for long. I liked dashes—still do—enough that they trumped any macho anxieties. Dashes are purposefully interruptive, enabling the interjection of a stray but welcome thought, while allowing a swift return to the mainstream without penalty. Truss offers another reason for their popularity. The dash, she says, is “easy to see,” compared to other marks that modern typefaces condemn to illegibility.

As for Truss's complaint that disorganized thought is the mode of most email, that is hardly surprising. Email is conversational, and disorganized thought is the mode of most conversation I am privy to. But while email provides the immediacy of conversation, it cannot deliver the facial expressions, hand gestures, and yawns that pepper face-to-face discourse—a handicap that has prompted the use of smiley faces and other compensatory graphics. Conversation, on the other hand, is thought to suffer from the absence of punctuation marks.

To compensate for the absence of typography in spoken language, we have the mock mark, typified by the practice of waving the first two fingers of each hand to simulate quotation marks. By simultaneously signaling both the opening and closing of a quotation, the gesture is self nullifying. The same violation of reason can be achieved vocally by preceding a quotation with “quote unquote.”

The mark mockery goes on. A period on the page serves to indicate what in speech would be an emphatic stop. Replicating it in spoken language emphasizes the emphasis, as in: “That's my last word on the subject. Period.”

There's more. Having come full circle in making its way from speech to print and back, the period is brought round and round again in Lands' End's (which, to match their corporate disregard for apostrophe placement, would have to be Lands' Ends') published slogan, “Guaranteed. Period,” Thus the mark that stands for the pause is augmented by the word that stands for the mark that stands for the pause. Doubling the redundancy, the period has its own period.

Period

Fig. 1 Illustration by Jesse Ragan