Caroline Taggart - The Accidental Apostrophe: ... And Other Misadventures in Punctuation

First published in Great Britain in 2017

by Michael OMara Books Limited

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London SW4 7NQ

Copyright Caroline Taggart 2017

Every reasonable effort has been made to acknowledge all copyright holders. Any errors or omissions that may have occurred are inadvertent, and anyone with any copyright queries is invited to write to the publisher, so that a full acknowledgement may be included in subsequent editions of this work.

All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording of otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78243-820-5 in hardback print format

ISBN: 978-1-78243-821-2 in ebook format

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For Rebecca, who somehow

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Also by This Author

Misadventures in the English Language

New Words for Old: Recycling our Language for the Modern World

500 Words You Should Know

Kicking the Bucket at the Drop of a Hat

Back to Basics

Answers to Rhetorical Questions

Pushing the Envelope

An Apple a Day

A Classical Education

My Grammar and I (Or Should That Be Me?) with J.A. Wines

I Used to Know That

Contents

In the course of this book I have quoted a number of authors and drawn attention to their punctuation. Im well aware that publishers have individual house styles that impose conventions on their authors; that copy-editors and proofreaders may alter an authors use of commas or hyphens; and that any of these individuals could make a mistake, be inconsistent or just not notice something that perhaps they should have noticed. So when I say, This author does [whatever it is they do], I realize that it could be publisher, editor or in at least two cases translator who is responsible for the punctuation of the final printed text. I apologize, therefore, if I have singled out the wrong person for criticism or praise.

In ancient times, blocks of text were commonly written justasblockswithoutevenwordspacingnevermindpunctuationtohelpthereadertointerpretthem. therewasnodistinctionbetweencapitalsandlowercaseletterseither. Orators using such texts as notes for a speech would prepare carefully so that they were familiar with the content and didnt come a cropper over a confusion between, say, The Notable Furniture Company and The No Table Furniture Company. Or the Greek or Latin equivalent.

It was a Greek librarian called Aristophanes (not the playwright), working in the great library of Alexandria in the third century BC , who introduced dots between phrases, to help the reader know where to pause. These were the forerunners of our commas, colons and full stops, but they didnt take the ancient world by storm. With the emphasis still on oratory and on reading aloud, rather than sitting at home quietly with a book, too few people had to bother about them for them to become standard usage.

As we entered the Christian era, sacred texts were widely read (by priests and even sometimes by the rest of us); it became ever more important to remove any likelihood of misinterpretation. To a potential murderer or adulterer, for example, there is a world of difference between If you are tempted, yield not, resisting the urge to commit a sin and If you are tempted, yield, not resisting the urge to commit a sin. And the only thing that has changed is the position of a comma.

But although people recognized that the idea of punctuation was important, it took them a while to devise a system. St Augustine of Hippo, writing at the end of the fourth century AD , advised scribes that if all else failed in the avoidance of ambiguity there is nothing to hinder us to point the sentence according to any method we choose.

Therein lies the crux of the problem. Any method we choose? What use is that? We need help, not permission to throw punctuation marks about willy-nilly (or should that be willy nilly?). Do we use a dash or a colon? A full stop or a semicolon? Inverted commas or italics? And where does that **** apostrophe go? Come on, Augustine, help us out here.

Aristophanes had been looking at one aspect of punctuation the symbols themselves whereas Augustine was talking about quite another how to use them. As far as the symbols were concerned, from about the seventh to the ninth century, lots of scholars put forward suggestions. St Isidore of Seville deserves an honourable mention, as does Alcuin of York, intellectual mover and shaker at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne. After that, things began to settle down, although illustrated medieval manuscripts allowed their scribes individual variations, touches of personal taste and whimsy. Then, with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, those variations disappeared under a hail of standardization and hot-metal type. To a large extent, the marks that Gutenberg was using in the 1450s reached the twenty-first century unscathed and un-improved upon.

Hold that thought: well be coming back to it later in the book.

So much for the symbols; what about the system that explained how to use them? Well, many centuries on from St Augustine, there were still surprisingly few hard and fast rules. Heres what an anonymous Short Introduction to English Grammar said in 1791:

... the doctrine of Punctuation must needs be very imperfect: few precise rules can be given which will hold without exception in all cases; but much must be left to the judgment and taste of the writer.

On the other hand, if a greater number of marks were invented to express all the possible different pauses of pronunciation, the doctrine of them would be very perplexed and difficult, and the use of them would rather embarrass than assist the reader.

It remains, therefore, that we be content with the Rules of Punctuation, laid down with as much exactness as the nature of the subject will admit: such as may serve for a general direction, to be accommodated to different occasions; and to be supplied, where sufficient, by the writers judgment.

Even today, many experts admit that quite a lot of punctuation is down to taste, or to your own or a publishers established style. Just as some publishers insist on spellings such as organization and realize, while others require organisation and realise, so some will use a serial comma (see ) and have a view on whether or not to hyphenate postmodernism. You may, of course, have your own opinions and want to act on them.

So what this book aims to do is to clarify the rules that do exist, because to introduce a handy example of dashes you may never have learned them, or may have learned them a while ago [time to drop in a semicolon]; it also sets out the options where the choice is yours. In addition, it will express a view on what does and doesnt matter, what you can get away with and what simply wont do. And, whenever it can, it will introduce examples to show that, contrary to what many people believe [and throwing in a pair of bracketing commas], punctuation is [here is a colon introducing a list]: