The subject of the period brings Bob—known as “Bobert” to his friend Thom, who never reconciled himself to Bob’s sudden desire to be called “Robert”—up short, stops him in his tracks. Moreover, thanks to his wife’s present indisposition, Bob finds himself in a celibate period, which tends to make him a bit dotty. However, he will not expatiate, and should someone ask him what is wrong, he will reply curtly, “Nothingperiod” Indeed, Bobert is occasionally given to the verbal punctuating of his sentences (“Are those new bracescomma Thomquestion mark”) and found it fascinating that even in Arabic or Chinese one would encounter one’s friend the period—something he discovered during periodic trips abroad during that full point in his life before radical surgery repunctuated him (see semicolon), end stopped his former occupations. The books on his shelf (held up barely by two bent brackets), given over in whole or part to matters punctuative—from The Harbrace College Handbook to Lynne Truss—now sit unread above the easy chair where once Bobert, punctual as nature’s menses, as the successive phases of the moon, would contemplate the comma, dote on the dash. Perhaps this silence is merely one of the two phrases composing the complete statement of his otherwise less than musical life; here, in any event, is his most recent word on the subject, a poem:
connect the dots: a period piece
ii. semicolon
Bobert’s semicolon was the result of radical surgery. It put a sort of stop to his life, though he knew there was more to come. Still, at the moment, he sat on his couch like a period atop a comma, his past and future linked vaguely in their mutual independence from his present state of mind. Say that Bobert was in a transitional phase; however, if his present was conjunctive vis-à-vis yesterday and tomorrow, it was equally liable to false connections; Bob was poised to mistake his nascent “survivor status” for the irretrievable loss of his erstwhile joie de vivre; let’s say it was his introduction to new concerns that had little to do with what had come before, hence requiring a full stop while Bobert collected his thoughts and attempted to reassemble (like a model car—say, the ’61 Corvette that has fallen from Bob’s shaky shelf) the fragments of his belief in the consilience of what he thought he knew (that, for instance, William Whewell, who coined the term “consilience,” as well as the term “scientist,” was somehow responsible for Bobert’s surgical abridgement, that these were somehow items closely related albeit in need of a strong conjunctive adverb—certainly, therefore, undoubtedly—or transitional phrase: as a result; granted that; as soon as).
iii. braces
Bobert has no truck with braces, his life being, as it were, in parenthesis. Indeed, he lost whatever love he might once have had for such elegant enclosures (Thom says the world has had no need for braces since it ran out of eighteenth century) on the day at the doctor’s when he had to brace himself for bad news. Leaving the office of “Dr. Hyphen,” as Bobert referred to him, refusing to pronounce in toto the doctor’s fancy, hyphenated surname, Bobert stopped for a bracer of Old Grand-Dad at a questionable bar from which he called Thom, to whom he could only exclaim excitedly, “my colon! My colon!” When Thom arrived, Bobert chose to overlook the fact that he was wearing braces (Thom being of generous girth although still embraceable, albeit not by Bobert) and, to make matters worse, some sort of skin bracer (Mennen or ’Lectric Shave). Bobert, the occlusion of whose teeth might have benefited from the application of braces—a fact to which Thom often reverted—had lately braced Thom for $10, but Thom let both topics rest that evening, choosing instead to observe that a brace of keypad keys is to this day devoted in part to the brace sinister and the brace dexter, for no reason Thom could see. Bobert hung fire, sipped his sour mash—courtesy of R.B. Hayden, distiller, of Hobbs Station, Kentucky—and idly ran a rope through a yardarm block left behind in the booth by some in-transit gob.
Was Bob’s favorite band ? and the Mysterians? Well, wasn’t he given to asking, “whatever happened to Rudy Martinez and the boys?” and “what were the two chords in ‘96 Tears’?” Was Bob given to asking questions of this sort? What does Thom say? When asked, Thom replies, “Of what sort?” Does Thom say that Bob is fond of questions Bob’s answers to which send him (Bob) into fits of self-inflicted tee-hee?
Bob: Did you know the supermarket is selling bread made by actual Trappist monksquestion mark Do you know the wrapper boasts “no trans fats”question mark
Thom: So?
Bob: Ah, but does it contain any Jumpin’ Jehosephatsquestion mark
Have we another example?
Bob: Don’t you think the motto of the United States ought to be “Got milk”question mark (Was Bob inspired to ask this because he happened at the time to be pouring two creamers into his breakfast coffee?)
Thom: Why not, “Got apple pie?” (Did Thom then sit back to await the correct answer while dunking a doughnut into his café Americano?)
Bob: Because that would be just stupidcomma don’t you seequestion mark Isn’t homogenized milk just like America’s official motto e pluribus unumditto
Thom: How so? Why isn’t it like Novus Ordo Seclorum? For that matter, why isn’t apple pie just like Annuit Coeptis? And, anyway, is e pluribus unum our official motto?
Bob: Our mottoyou guessed it
Thom: Isn’t it “In God We Trust”?
Bob: Then shouldn’t it be “In God We Trustquestion mark”
Thom: Bob, where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?
(Why was Thom pretending to be Paul Gauguin? Or was he?)
“Thomexclamation point” Bob exclaims, “how can you reveal such things about meexclamation point You know I am in a fragile stateexclamation point Whycomma I’ve lost part of my colonexclamation point” The look on Bob’s phiz was an exclamatory “!” expressing both surprise and strong emotion . . . indeed, Thom had noticed that since Bobert’s surgery, Bob was distractingly exclamatory, so much so that everything he said or did seemed an exaggeration! Before the removal of a comma’s worth of colon, Bob, having been off and on an academic in spirit if not in fact, had not favored the use of exclamations on the theory that nothing excites or surprises a true intellectual!
When Thom was first apprised of Bob’s notions vis-à-vis the sobriety if not the severity of intellectuals, the look that flitted across his ruddy visage was the familiar if slightly paradoxical “?!” Thom, you see, has always thought highly of the exclamation . . . indeed, to call a shovel a shovel,* Thom digs it because, if I might interject a perhaps sensitive detail, he finds it a kissing cousin to the ejaculation!
vi. colon
It is tempting to return at this point to Bobert’s colon, which is still more or less in use. Or to introduce Cleveland/Montreal/Chicago/Anaheim/Los Angeles/Boston/Chicago pitcher Bartolo Colon (five wins, three losses so far this season, last time I looked), who is not, incidentally, from Cologne, although he may use cologne after a hot day on the mound. It is tempting at this point to make a bad joke about the use of cologne and being on the mound, or, in this case, the mons (a sometimes hirsute subject not to be confused with the Buddhist people of eastern Myanmar). But I will do neither. Neither will I stray into the arena of classical prosody, although that might be appropriate, wherein “colon” refers to “one of the members or sections of a rhythmical period, consisting of a sequence of from two to six feet united under a principal ictus or beat,” according to Dictionary.com (which, today, perhaps not coincidentally, offers a link to the always arresting topic of colon cleansing). Nor has Bobert’s colon much to do with colonial plantation owners (especially in Algeria) or the so-called monetary units of El Salvador or Costa Rica (Bartolo Colon is from the Dominican Republic, so his name should not be understood as the Spanish equivalent of Johnny Paycheck) (born Donald Eugene Lytle, Paycheck was imprisoned once for shooting a man and once for statuary rape; his death, from emphysema- and asthma-related complications, had nothing to do with his colon). None of which, alas, serves to properly introduce: Bob’s colon.
vii. dash
Bob needs to spice up his life—give it a pinch of pleasure, a touch of trouble, a dash of danger—“perhapscomma” he thinks, “I should go into training for the Olympicsdash saycomma the fiftyhyphenyard dashexclamation point”—as he dashed to the door, only to have his hopes dashed because it was not the pizza man knocking but a brace of perambulating evangelists—one quite dashing—& in a fit of pique he dashes them both—in Morse Code, in a flurry of verbal dots and dashes—to counter what Bob considers the secret code of evangelism—but when Thom drops by, just as Bob is about to add a dash or three of Tabasco to his lately arrived cheese-and-pepperoni pizza, he—Thom—could only sputter “What?—What?!” to Bob’s story, for as Bob relates how he dashed the petrified proselytizers’ pamphlets to the pavement—“Is that personification?” Thom interjected; “Nocomma you assonance-holesemicolon it’s alliteration,” snapped Bob parenthetically—his use of the verb “dashed”—in the transitive—sent Thom off on a reverie the burden of which was the cumbersome necessity of forming a dash when typing by double-striking the hyphen key, a flaw in keypad designers’ thinking that could easily be remedied if one of the brace keys—say, the brace dexter—were devoted instead to the dash proper.
viii. ellipsis
Something is missing from Bobert’s life . . . something in addition to a stretch of his colon (see colon; semicolon) . . . something, as we have seen, that now gives him pause and makes him brace himself for worse . . . Thom, meanwhile, has taken a new job . . . his friendship with Bob suffers . . . as Thom meets obligations vocational and familial, Bob stews, feeling his days are numbered . . . his woes numberless . . . what words, he wonders, have been omitted from his new life’s sentence . . . and of the words remaining, had he dotted their i’s and crossed their t’squestion mark . . . do they match those that once completed the thought of him . . . even if mismatched, ungrammatical, or “awk” (as his high-school teacher used to write beside any number of his efforts to express his often elliptical insights) . . . Still, Bob finds the omission most inappropriate . . . and penciled a Morse Code “S” on the table so that he would not forget . . . but forget what?
-.. .- ... .... | .. - | ..--.. |, he opined, and made a dash for another piece of pizza, pausing to clip a coupon taped to the lid of the box . . . cutting carefully along the dotted lines.
ix. forward slash
It would be presumptuous to say anything regarding the forward slash.
x. hyphen
Bob has begun to st-st-stutter. A lover of the dash—his favorite fictional character is Aunt Em, his favorite writer of fiction Dashiel Hammett—Bob was once f-f-fond of the hyphen as well, but now it only presents pro-pro-pro-problems. Moreover, in his con-con-convalescent state, he has come to hate self-service gas stations, left-handed compliments related to his O-so-precarious health, Thom’s fondness for Tex-Mex. Why this change of attitude toward the once-beloved hyphen is hard to explain. After all, when Bob’s colon was partially excised, it was not as though a dash had been inserted between the remaining sections—a colon with a gap being of precious little utility—but conjoined, hyphenated, as it were, by his surgeon, or so muses Bob when contemplating what he hopes will prove a once-in-a-lifetime medical adventure. As for the excised one and five-eighths inches, it was doubtless dashed into a pail of soon-to-be-discarded medical waste, the oft-regretted loss of which has rendered Bob less self-possessed, more self-absorbed, and—oddly—anti-hyphen.
xi. apostrophe*
Since his surgery, Bob’s been experiencing contractions of the bowels, which have made him—you guessed it—irritable. He’s also developed the conviction that Thom is repeating everything he says. “He says,” reveals Thom, “that he can’t believe I would ‘steal [his] words’ (to say nothing of his ‘thunder’) and thereby ‘betray him.’” Moreover, Thom reports that Bob’s lost his former interest in baseball, never speaking as once he did about “Bartolo Colon or ‘Sudden’ Sam McDowell.” As for rock ’n’ roll, weeks pass with no questions regarding ? and the Mysterians . . . it’s sad,” concludes Thom. “Bob’s even stopped punctuating his sentences: no more ‘I donapostrophet believe it,’ no sirree! Our friendship, which had recapitulated the history of contractions,” opines Thom, “has now shifted into reverse.** When first we met, it was ‘do not,’ then ‘do nt,’ then ‘don’t’—well, really, ‘donapostrophet’—which as you can clearly see signaled a growth in intimacy, casualness, and comfort—but now (I guess it’s those post-traumatic-stress contractions) Bobert’s returned to addressing me with the formality of a business letter.” Thom slashes at the ground with a comma-shaped stick before adding, “Bob’s even given up on the possessive case . . . I’m at 6’s and 7’s . . . and y’all can quote me on that.”
xii. comma
Despite Bobert’s (presently waning) punctuphilia, to talk about the comma always gave him pause—for it is indeed the Coca Cola of points, the rest stop that refreshes on the way to one’s final destination, although to stop is only to begin again, often as not, as this very sentence demonstrates, like it or not. It—the comma—is a place to linger, to savor the trip so far, while the promise of revelation blossoms and the frustration of confusion may yet be resolved. It is a small clarification of the journey, like the maps outside the turnpike restrooms that tell us “You Are Here,” and we see that exit fifteen is in fact not our exit, as we thought, just as the comma’s absence is in itself a clarification: that it is not that all patients both lose part of their colons and experience bowel contractions (“all patients, who lose part of their colons, experience bowel contractions”) but only those who find themselves in a semicolonic state who find themselves with griped guts (“all patients who lose part of their colons experience bowel contractions”). (If indeed they do.)
On the other hand, one reads that vibrio cholerae is “a comma-shaped bacterium,” infesting the intestines and inducing both vomiting and what one medical text terms “massive diarrhoea” on its way through one’s bowels, through eventually large intestine to colon (or, in Bob’s case, should he ever succumb, to semicolon) to rectum in explosive, “rice water” excretions: hardly a pause calculated to refresh. Nevertheless, Bobert could use a few commas to splice his life together, or perhaps the removal of same to fuse the fragments left from too much thinking about Bartolo Colon, the period, and Thom’s braces.
xiii. slash
Increasingly, Bob is given to cutting remarks that have sliced off a few of Thom’s emotional pockets and buttons, rough and sweeping invective, Errol Flynn swordplay wedded to W.C. Fields barbs that serve, oddly, both to divide and to unite the two friends: Bob/Thom. Thom remains sanguine, feeling that if the two were once a rhymed couplet, they are now that same couplet but embedded in a paragraph of prose. Nevertheless, he cannot help feeling that the value of their relationship has been drastically reduced.
What do you think, Bob?
1) Is Thom correct? Yes/No (circle one)
2) Is this an either/or situation? Yes/No (circle one)
3) Is yours an on-again/off-again relationship? Yes/No (circle one)
4) Are you clearing mental space for arable purposes? Yes/No (circle one)
5) Is Thom now a friend and/or enemy? (circle 5/16 of one choice and 1/16 of the other)
6) Are you attempting to slit the outer fabric of your personality to reveal your true colors?
Yes/No (circle one)
7) In the space below, please reveal your inner-most thoughts and feelings as of 6/8/18:
When Thom and Bob were single, they often double-dated. Thom, attempting to effect a rapprochement, recalls an evening with Deb and Dottie at Mr. Larry’s Beef and Tails, causing Bob to sneer, “May I quote you? Can you give me a quote on what I should bid for ‘your’ words from my mouth?”
Thom, who had once imagined that the story of their friendship would eventually be so eventful and rich, hence lengthy, that, if ever written down and titled, its title would be italicized, now fears he is rather nearing the end of a short story. Tears threaten Thom’s malar regions (“malar”: “relating to the cheek”). Still, Thom “presses on,” saying he finds Bob’s remarks “amusing,” arcing two fingers of each hand through a brief space of air to indicate sarcasm.
“You find my remarks quotation markamusingquotation mark question mark
“‘You find my remarks “amusing”?’” Thom parrots, although the remark is not especially quotable.
“I find you ‘amusing.’” (Four fingers inscribing Bob’s own sarcasm in Thom’s face.)
“Quotha!” smiles Thom, although whether he is expressing surprise or contempt is difficult to say. One supposes the former. Certainly it is surprise that registers on Bob’s mug: “!”
“‘!’ indeed,” says Thom, shaking his “noggin” sadly.
xv. brackets
That Thom and Bob find braces a racket has been established (see braces), but both, despite their recent differences, admire the serviceable bracket, its several scholarly uses. True, its work is sporadic, its income therefore placing it in a lower-income bracket, yet it is most respectable work; like the secretary of a busy businessman, the bracket (both dexter and sinister) is indispensable if often intrusive. Just so Bob’s wife (his current wife, wife #4, is here meant), whose frolicsome forays into Bob’s withdrawn life were like insertions and clarifications into his parenthetical days and often merely quoted emotions [sic], which (i.e., those “frolicsome forays”) Bob often recited to himself when Thom was unavailable.
But to bracket such details and return to Thom’s remark about “find[ing] [his, i.e., Thom’s] remarks ‘amusing’”—why has Bob, his semicolon and his attendant emotional ejaculations notwithstanding, hung up his joie de vivre like a flower basket from a front-porch bracket? Clearly, Bob is in need of support here in the bracket between his life’s explosions: after all, is ours not a right-angle relationship with God, and is it not true that we read in 1 John 4:20 (see also Mark 12:31), “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” Bob’s brackish response: “Thom is not my quote brotherclose quote period”
xvi. parentheses
Although he sees egress both above and beneath him, Bob feels trapped within some enclosure that has separated him from the main idea of his life. (He feels, he says, like David Jones [not to be confused with Davy Jones of the Monkees].) His parenternal life is fine if sometimes paresthetic (it does not take “guts” to live it); indeed, his intestinal life is likewise fine (although it does take guts to live it). Nonetheless, Bob—with or without Thom and wife #4 by his side (and whether he loses himself in contemplation of Bartolo Colon, ? and the Mysterians, or the stylistic difference between “and” and “&”)—feels paresis coming on and parenthesizes this fear whenever it up-wells. In short: (Bob + semicolon) + Thom (+ or – wife #4) ≠ happiness. May the Paraclete (in Middle English, Paraclit, which makes Thom blush) both advocate for and comfort Bob.
& until a new mark of punctuation is invented, here we must leave him.
* The more familiar phrase “to call a spade a spade” has been altered in deference to Thom’s extreme sensitivity to racial connotations in the English language. To have employed “to call a spade a spade” would have provoked Thom to cry out, to give voice to a “sudden, vehement utterance” (“Exclamation,” Webster’s New World Dictionary, 2nd College Ed.). Our alteration, however, is not capricious but stands on a firm etymological foundation, viz.:
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1913) defines [to call a spade a spade] as “To be outspoken, blunt, even to the point of rudeness; to call things by their proper names without any ‘beating around the bush.’” Its ultimate source is Plutarch’s Apophthegmata Laconica (178B) which has την σκαφην σκαφην λεγοντας. σκαφη mean[ing] “basin, trough,” but it was mis-translated as ligo “shovel” by Erasmus in his Apophthegmatum opus. Lucian De Hist. Conscr. (41) has τα συκα συκα, την σκαφην δε σκαφην ονομασων: “calling a fig a fig, and a trough a trough” (Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia).
NB: Harper’s reported back in December, 2007, that a minimum of 310 edits to Wikipedia since June 2004 “have been traced back to the CIA,” which I pass along gratis because you should know.
* The author is well aware that apostrophes and single quotation marks serve different punctuative purposes and both apologizes for muddily mingling them here and thanks
all those who have pointed this error out to him. He does, however, maintain that visually they are identical, as any fool can see.
** Alas, matters of grammar and usage fall outside the parameters of this story.