ALMOST NOTHING OCCASIONS MORE confusion in less confident writers, and more rage in proud pedants, than punctuation. My publishing stablemate Lynne Truss sold three million copies of her wittily irritable book on the subject, Eats, Shoots and Leaves. It’s reasonable to see that as a reflection of how deep – though hitherto how little examined – our feelings about punctuation are.
People really mind. The so-called ‘greengrocer’s apostrophe’ – as in ‘Clementine’s 50p each’ – is a pet peeve of countless sticklers. Pages shouty with exclamation marks, or where commas are scattered as if shot from a blunderbuss, vex many even quite free-and-easy language users. The perpetrator will be marked down in the reader’s mind as either sloppy or semiliterate.
That means that the writer hoping to persuade needs to pay special attention to how he or she punctuates. There are rules. These rules may not be what some sticklers imagine them to be, and they have changed over the years and are continuing to change. But many punctuation usages, in standard written English in a formal context,* are pretty firmly established. You won’t find a comma in the middle of a word, for instance. A sentence in continuous prose can’t end in an oblique. You can’t open a parenthesis with a comma and close it with a bracket.
It’s worth starting by thinking about exactly what punctuation is for. It’s one of the things, along with word order and morphology (the way words change their forms and endings), that help orient the words in a sentence. Punctuation marks are signposts through a sentence. Some of them inflect a sentence’s tone or meaning: a question or an exclamation mark change what you might think of as a sentence’s tone of voice. Some of them denote a relationship between one part of a sentence and another: brackets tell you that what’s in them isn’t part of the main flow of the sentence; a colon signals that what comes after it elaborates or depends on what goes before.
Originally, though, punctuation began as a device used by scribes to help people reading aloud know where to pause. The big four marks – the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the full stop – were primarily understood to denote the length of a pause, with a full stop in some accounts of it four times as long as a comma. But those marks were taken up by printers and grammarians and repurposed as aids to semantic understanding. In effect – as with many other features of the language – prescriptive grammarians attempted to fold them into a logically consistent system. So punctuation now plays two parts: it both marks time for the reading voice and signposts grammatical relationships. Many of the arguments about punctuation arise from the overlap between its two functions. A comma can be there simply to mark a pause – but it can also have a role in marking a parenthesis or separating two clauses. As the linguist David Crystal writes: ‘This is where we see the origins of virtually all the arguments over punctuation that have continued down the centuries and which are still with us today.’*
Punctuation is also subject to fashion. We live in an age that favours light punctuation. We use fewer commas than our forebears. We omit full stops at the ends of sentences in many circumstances – the titles of books, on signposts and in text messages or social media posts. We are more likely to do away with hyphens when writing compound words – preferring semicolon to semi-colon, for instance.
But with relatively rare points of genuine dispute, it is possible to set out something like a set of rules for the standard use of punctuation marks in continuous prose.
Let’s go through point by point.† First, the trio of what sometimes get called sentence-final punctuation marks: the full stop, the question mark and the exclamation mark.
In formal writing a full stop’s main job, as any fule kno, is to signal the end of a sentence. That is the straightforward part.
Not all sentences, or not all statements, need to end in a full stop. Question and exclamation marks and ellipses can end a sentence too – though they can be seen as special cases of the full stop. Newspaper headlines, book titles, advertising straplines or other forms of signwriting, and informal communications such as text messaging and social media status updates, often dispense with the full stop or use it differently.
The question mark is another form of sentence-final punctuation. You could think of it as a full stop with a waving flag on top* – that flag signalling that the sentence (or sentence fragment?) in question is a question – if that’s not begging the question.
The one big rule for using question marks correctly is: use them for direct questions and direct questions only. This is, apparently, easier said than done. You now see them used – and it makes sticklers wince – in the case of indirect or implied questions as well.
1. ‘Hi, I hope you are well?’ This seems to be the near-universal greeting from the public-relations professional attempting to give a mass email press release the personal touch.† The confusion arises, obviously, because this seems to be another way of asking whether you are well: there is an implied question as to your wellness. Doesn’t matter. ‘I hope you are well’ is, grammatically, a statement about your hope, not a question about my wellness. ‘Are you well?’ is a question. ‘I hope I never hear from your insincere mail-merging ass ever again’ is a statement.
2. ‘Surely you’re not getting worked up about a friendly press release?’ Again, wrong. ‘Surely’ – a sentence adverb that seems to attract question marks like flies to a cowpat – does not ask a question; it offers a supposition. The presence of doubt in a sentence about the world – and we have a whole delicate grammatical apparatus for conveying degrees of epistemological certainty – does not in itself mandate a question mark. That is reserved for … direct questions.
3. ‘My friend heard what you were saying about question marks, and he wonders if you need to get out a bit more?’ Again, no. This is what in grammar is called an indirect question. An indirect question is, you could say, a statement about a question. The question is being reported, not asked. ‘He wonders if’ is indicative in mood: it’s a statement. And no matter how intensely that wondering is going on, it doesn’t warrant a question mark.
Informally, question marks can appear mid-sentence – usually as part of a parenthesis, though they’re unwieldy even then: ‘I first started getting pompous about the misuse of question marks twenty (or was it twenty-five?) years ago …’
In dialogue, too, you can use them – usually mockingly – to signal the various forms of rising intonation that Young People use: ‘He was like, and I was like, so he was like, and then I was just whatever, and then he asked me to the prom?’
And as ever, the system has wrinkles. Some sentences that are questions, grammatically speaking, can get away with taking a different punctuation mark because of their meaning. In The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, for instance, Huddleston and Pullum note that you could write: ‘Aren’t they lucky to have got away with it!’ or ‘Who cares what I think about it anyway!’ Sticklers may demur. But if our concern is with the expressive range of the language, there’s no question that a distinction between ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ and ‘Isn’t she lovely!’ adds to that resource.
Like exclamation marks, these are best used singly – except, possibly, when expressing outrage and bafflement in the margins of someone else’s work. Two handwritten question marks in a margin is an economical way of saying: ‘Are you absolutely sure about that? It sounds like you’ve gone right off your onion.’ But then, marginal doodles – like the proofreading signs that make marginal doodling a profession – are a little outside the province of this book.
‘Like laughing at your own joke,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald of this most gaudy of punctuation marks. He had a point. Overusing exclamation marks makes you sound hectoring and overexcited. That idea of laughing at your own joke – of paying yourself a compliment – has been there from the beginning. When they arrived in the language in the fourteenth century, David Crystal tells us, they were called the ‘point of admiration’ – and later, the ‘admirative point’ and the ‘wonderer’. It’s since Dr Johnson that we’ve had ‘exclamation’ – shifting the emphasis from admiration to the expression of strong feeling.
In any case, the exclamation mark signals excitability. It may be a sense of this that led to a notably stupid edict from the UK’s Department of Education in early 2016. Ministers told primary school teachers that sentences ending in an exclamation mark could only be marked correct if they began with the words ‘How’ or ‘What’. As in:
How silly this advice is!
What asses those education ministers are!
That’s plain wrong. There are many other sorts of sentences that either can or must take an exclamation mark. Exclamations, obviously, ask for them – and sentences of the ‘How’ or ‘What’ variety are near the top of the queue. Fowler, indeed, begins its discussion of exclamation marks with ‘how’ and ‘what’ sentences. But it goes on to mention wishes, alarm calls, commands, calls for attention and allpurpose shouting.
So:
If only I could swim! (wish)
Help! I’m drowning! (alarm call)
Pull me out of the water! (command)
Over here! (call for attention)
Glub glub! Aaargh! (all-purpose shouting)
It’s hard to see how you could punctuate ‘Help! I’m drowning!’ in any other way. ‘Help. I’m drowning.’ does not convey quite the same sense of urgency. But then again, if you’re actually drowning you’re unlikely to be writing your feelings on the subject down on a bit of paper – and there’s a useful hint there. Many, if not most, legitimate uses of the exclamation mark in prose are ways of punctuating speech.
The default position of the written word is one of calm consideration: even strong emotion is being reflected on and given shape. You are composing sentences, not blurting them. So you’ll almost certainly only need an exclamation mark if you’re writing in an informal way designed to replicate the effects of speech. A talky newspaper column might warrant the odd one – but if they’re popping up in your business letters, essays, reports or presentations they almost certainly shouldn’t be. The Economist’s Style Guide is so mortified by the very idea of them that it makes no mention of their existence.
Fowler’s position is the conventional one. Except for literary uses, in which all bets are as usual off,* it says that it should be used ‘sparingly’: ‘Excessive use of exclamation marks in expository prose is a certain indication of an unpractised writer or one who wishes to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.’ It’s the mark that says: ‘Go home; you’re drunk.’
The use of double or even triple exclamation marks in a formal context is a complete no-no. ‘OMG!!’ is fine for a text message. Indeed, ‘OMG’ with no punctuation, or with a full stop, will look positively sarcastic to some.
There are two main uses for the ellipsis – aka dot-dot-dot – in normal writing.
One is as a half-hearted cousin of the full stop used when a sentence just sort of trails off … It conveys hesitancy or tentativeness, something unspoken or something implied. In this role it effectively stands in for a sometimes pregnant pause in the spoken word.
‘I was wondering if I could get one of those … you know … something for the …’ ‘A packet of condoms, young man? Why, all you have to do is ask!’
As in the above example, if the ellipsis is indicating broken speech in short chunks you don’t have to recapitalise after it as you would for a full stop. It behaves more like a comma or dash.
In a more technical context it can imply the continuation of a list: ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 …’
The other use for the ellipsis is to indicate missing material in a quotation. It’s fairly easy to see how this can be confused with its first role; sometimes deliberately. If you’re being punctilious, or quoting formally, it’s almost always best to put that missing material in square brackets to make clear that you’re indicating excised material rather than simply a pause.
He was, at least until he murdered my wife, my dearest friend.
He was … my dearest friend.
No surprise that the abuse of the ellipsis is a particular favourite of the designers of posters for critically savaged films, or the harvesters of book reviews for paperback editions.
My note above that it’s primarily a punctuation of the spoken language can be helpful when deciding whether to use it in writing. It’s for that reason, I think, that it has acquired a whole new life in the more conversational communications we now have on email and social media. It can say ‘um’ or ‘etc.’ or ‘to be continued’. This is especially handy when a writer under pressure from the character-count of Twitter, for instance, wants to make a point over the course of more than one tweet.
@fullstoplover I think the full stop is being seen less and less on social media because we …
@fullstoplover … like to keep things informal and conversational in those circumstances and sometimes …
@fullstoplover … we need to be able to indicate that we haven’t stopped talking …
But it is also one of the alternatives that seems to be taking over, somewhat, from heavier sentence-final punctuation on the internet. I frequently find myself ending emails to reviewers I commission with ellipses: ‘Let me know if the idea appeals …’
The aforementioned David Crystal caused a worldwide storm when he suggested, at a talk in the summer of 2016, that the full stop was acquiring a new use as an emotionmarker in instant messaging.
John’s coming to the party [statement of fact]
John’s coming to the party. [Oh dear!]
He pointed out that there’s a finality to the use of full stops that in these contexts can seem overly formal or even rude – as if you’re pointedly signalling an end to the conversation.
This is both a sensible and interesting observation. Unfortunately, it was reported as a distinguished linguist having pronounced the imminent extinction of the full stop as a punctuation mark. As Crystal wrote in a blog afterwards:
My point got reported on the front page of the Telegraph – front page, no less – and the online site had the headline ‘Full stop falling out of fashion thanks to instant messaging’. Note the generalisation. Whereas I was saying that the full stop was changing in instant messaging (and the like), the paper reports it as changing everywhere because of instant messaging.
He who sows the wind …
To return to Crystal’s real point, the ellipsis – along with no sentence-final punctuation at all – is one of the full stop’s replacements in these arenas.
The comma is a very versatile piece of mid-sentence punctuation, used more than any other single punctuation mark. The rules governing its usage are a bit of a nightmare. This is not least because it retains more strongly than any other mark its use as a general-purpose pause signaller.
So, for instance:
When you’re writing a mid-length sentence like this one you don’t absolutely need a comma.
When you’re writing a mid-length sentence like this one, you could on the other hand put a comma in.
When you’re writing a mid-length sentence, like this one, you could use two commas to mark one phrase out as a parenthesis.
All three of those are perfectly grammatical. Version two is a little easier on the reader: it allows for a catching of the breath. Version three lets you catch your breath on either side of the parenthesis. But the decision is a stylistic one rather than an absolute rule.
Do keep in mind, though, that if you’re using a comma as part of a parenthesis, or to mark out a dependent clause, it needs an opposite number. Parenthetical commas work just the same way as brackets: they hold a chunk out of the main text as if between tongs. So you wouldn’t write:
When you’re writing a mid-length sentence, like this one you could use two commas to mark one phrase out as a parenthesis.
As so often, reading a sentence aloud and making a point of pausing on the commas will help you to notice when there’s one missing. The above sentence simply doesn’t sound right if you only have one comma in it.
The importance of getting commas right is illustrated by an apocryphal story about a teacher who got on the wrong side of a school inspector. The inspector – an anything-goes type – complained that the teacher was paying too much attention to punctuation.
The teacher went to the blackboard. He wrote:
The inspector said the teacher was an idiot.
Then he added a couple of commas
The inspector, said the teacher, was an idiot.
Commas can be hard to keep track of because – though they all look the same – they have more than one possible use. Lots of sentences have single commas (or odd numbers of commas), so it’s harder to notice when you’ve failed to close a parenthesis. A single bracket sticks out. A single comma is camouflaged. It’s especially prone to get lost if you need to use a comma within the parenthesis itself.
When Sam embarked on this sentence, whose lengthy parenthesis, he hoped, would make punctuation tricky, he didn’t bank on having to rewrite it several times.
That one might work better if you used brackets or, as below, dashes.
When Sam embarked on this sentence – whose lengthy parenthesis, he hoped, would make punctuation tricky – he didn’t bank on having to rewrite it several times.
The comma also often articulates between two linked clauses, particularly if the dependent clause comes first:
When he saw Snoopy wasn’t at home, Charlie Brown slammed the kennel door.
If you put it the other way round you can usually dispense with the comma:
Charlie Brown slammed the kennel door when he saw Snoopy wasn’t at home.
Another use of commas that causes confusion is, if you like, a special case of parenthesis: when they are used to mark out a relative clause.
The man who smelled of fish showed me the door.
Here we’re indicating that of all the men in the room it was the fishy-smelling one who saw the speaker out. The fishy smell is the defining quality of the subject. This is what’s called a restrictive or a defining relative clause. You don’t need commas.
The man, who smelled of fish, showed me the door.
Here we’re indicating that the man who showed the speaker the door happened to smell of fish. Perhaps the other men in the room smelled of fish too, but perhaps not. It’s a parenthetical observation – an optional extra. The commas mark it out as such. See also ‘That, Which and Who’ in ‘Perils and Pitfalls’.
The comma also serves to separate adjectives or adverbs when you have a number of them affixed to the same referent. I once had a Nirvana T-shirt that read:
Flower-sniffin’, kitty-pettin’, baby-kissin’ corporate rock whores.
Corporate rock whores they might have been, but they understood as well as anyone the proper placement of the comma. Light punctuation means that short runs of adjectives can be left comma-free, though:
I saw funny little green men trooping out of the spaceship.
The Oxford comma, or ‘serial comma’, is something people like to argue over. This is the comma you see (or don’t) between the last term of a list and the word ‘and’. If you’re using the Oxford comma, you’d write ‘Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme’; if you’re not using it, you’d write ‘Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme’. This is a choice about style. The serial comma isn’t a mistake – it’s a long-attested usage that was in fact the dominant one in an era of heavier punctuation – though many people including me prefer not to use it. That said, on some occasions you positively need to insert one to resolve an ambiguity:
The guests at the party included two prostitutes, my ex-wife and the guitarist from Pink Floyd.
The attentive reader will notice that this is at best ungallant and at worst libellous: without a serial comma the suggestion is that rather than being a list the second half of that sentence is in apposition to the first. Much safer to write it as follows:
The guests at the party included two prostitutes, my ex-wife, and the guitarist from Pink Floyd.
Nice and robust, the colon. It doesn’t mess about. If you have two clauses that need linking, the colon is your man. Fowler’s line on it – that its job is ‘delivering the goods that have been invoiced in the previous words’ – gets the sense of it pretty well. Whatever comes after a colon explicitly unpacks or develops on what comes before it. It stands in, as Fowler notes, for expressions like viz, for example, that is to say, namely and so on.
I only had one reason to stay sitting: I was shackled to the chair.
In the same vein, the colon introduces lists and examples.
He packed his usual gear for the beach: surfboard, trunks, binoculars, shark spray and waterproof hammers.
In UK English the letter after a colon is lower case. US usage tends to capitalise after colons.
I know one shouldn’t have favourite punctuation marks; but I have a particular fondness for the semicolon. It’s supple in its use, precise, and – which is the best thing about it – unshowy. It can coordinate a compound sentence, mark out items in a complex or extended multi-clause list … and it does so with a very becoming modesty. If the comma is fire and the full stop is ice, to adapt This Is Spinal Tap, the semicolon is lukewarm water. Semicolons allow you to get away with much longer sentences, and help make those sentences decipherable to the reader. If you have a succession of related thoughts, the semicolon allows you to articulate the links between them much more easily and clearly than any other mark.
If those thoughts are separated by full stops, any relationship of consequence, dependency or subordination has to be inferred by the reader. You are presenting two things as if independently.
He sat on the chair. He was tired.
A colon staples the two things together. It insists on a relationship. But remember the colon-gun is a one-shot weapon. You look very odd using more than one colon in a sentence.
He sat on the chair: he was tired.
He sat on the chair: he was tired: it had been a long night.
Where the colon insists, the semicolon suggests. Also – though not everyone would, as a stylistic decision – you can get away with using more than one semicolon as a coordinator.
He sat on the chair; he was tired; it had been a long night.
The two main uses of the semicolon are
1. to separate independent clauses in a compound sentence
2. to separate items in a list, particularly if the items are long and unwieldy enough that commas won’t quite do it.
In The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (Viking, 1979), the doctor Lewis Thomas wrote:
The things I like best in T. S. Eliot’s poetry, especially in the Four Quartets, are the semicolons. You cannot hear them, but they are there, laying out the connections between the images and the ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.
It’s a mark that divides writers like no other, though. ‘Do not use semicolons,’ wrote Kurt Vonnegut. ‘They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.’ George Orwell – another enemy of pretentiousness – took so strongly against semicolons that he made a point of writing Coming Up for Air without using a single one. But then, a little poignantly, he wrote to his publisher to boast about it because – we can presume – he was worried that nobody would notice.
On the other hand the Czech writer Milan Kundera, whose side I take in this, wrote in 1988: ‘I once left a publisher for the sole reason that he tried to change my semicolons to periods.’
There are, for the ordinary user, two main sorts of dash:
1. the em-bar or em-dash (which was originally the width of the letter M on a printer’s block): —
2. the en-dash (which was the width of an N): –
The dash, as they used to say about absinthe, rend fou.* Depending on your word-processing package, your nationality and the time of day, the rules about dashes will vary. Em-dash and en-dash are often in free variation, with the difference that an em-dash will generally butt right up against the words next door to it and the en-dash will generally have a space on either side.
Dashes can do the work of a colon, a semicolon or a comma – essentially, marking off a pause or introducing (with a bit more emphasis) the coordinator in a compound sentence.
Compare:
He went to the chemist, but they were out of pregnancy tests.
And
He went to the chemist – but they were out of pregnancy tests.
The latter, with that slightly more dramatic pause, makes the case seem a little bit more urgent.
Unlike commas or semicolons, however, they can’t be used in a limitless series.* You’ll find either one of them, or a pair, in any given sentence.
Paired dashes work to mark out parentheses or interpolations. I recognise in myself – because you end up noticing these things – an addiction to them. They seem to me to occupy a role somewhere between the comma and the bracket proper in this case: a little more swashbuckling than the bracket in terms of maintaining the conversational flow of the sentence; a little more emphatic (and, potentially, less confusing) than the comma. The material included between two dashes is slightly more likely to be important to the meaning of the sentence than material between brackets: an addition or qualification rather than an optional extra.
There are some qualifications to their use in this role: you can’t use a pair of dashes to separate out part of a word or an entire sentence, as you can with brackets:
Book(s) may not be removed from the library.
He looked sheepish when he came in. (I didn’t know that he’d removed some books from the library.)
Try punctuating either of those with paired dashes and see where you get.
Other punctuation marks don’t always play nicely with dashes. If a stronger punctuation mark such as a full stop finds itself next to a dash, for instance, it will likely absorb it. So some single-dash sentences are in effect parentheses whose second dash has been gobbled up by a full stop.
We should play some Pixies songs at band practice – ‘Wave of Mutilation’, for example.
If that were in brackets, they would close:
We should play some Pixies songs at band practice (‘Wave of Mutilation’, for example).
Likewise, if the parenthetical phrase were brought forward it would earn a second dash:
We should play some Pixies songs – ‘Wave of Mutilation’, for example – at band practice.
That’s what I mean about hungry full stops. Poor dash!
Dashes are also used to mark interrupted dialogue:*
‘They couldn’t hit an elephant from this dist—’ was the last thing the general said as he surveyed the enemy guns.
This cousin of the dash deserves separate treatment because where the dash has a function in the syntax of the sentence, the hyphen is involved with the guts of the words themselves. What Fowler calls the ‘stretchingly difficult subject of hyphenation’ is stretchy for two reasons. One is that in the hyphen’s main use – linking the elements in compound words – there’s huge variation in practice, and it changes fast. The other is that the hyphen has two seemingly opposite jobs: it pushes things together, but it also separates them. (In this, if in nothing else, it is the Wonderbra of punctuation.)
In its most common use, the hyphen indicates that a word or a series of words (or word fragments such as prefixes) have been glued together to form a single expression. It’s a favourite of cowboys. Hence:
You no-good, low-down, double-dealing, back-biting, flea-bitten, two-timing, double-crossing, two-bit, polecat-bothering, anti-feminist son-of-a-bitch.
Roughly speaking, the more common the compound’s usage the more likely it is that the hyphen will disappear altogether. You might very well see ‘backbiting’ and ‘doublecrossing’ written as one word; ‘polecatbothering’, not so much. There’s considerable variation transatlantically, too. The disappearance of the hyphen is especially common (for the same reason) when it’s used to attach prefixes. ‘Antimatter’, ‘re-invigorate’ and ‘de-regulate’ are all now more likely to appear hyphen-free than otherwise. ‘Antidisestablishmentarianism’, one word with two prefixes, has been proudly hyphen-free ever since, when I was a lad, it took its place in my collection of long words.
But – and here’s where the separating function of the hyphen comes in – you should retain or even insert a hyphen when leaving it out makes a word tricky to parse or pronounce. So though ‘coterminous’ is seldom seen with a hyphen, ‘co-op’ is seldom seen without one – because the reader’s brain naturally pounces on something to do with chickens. Likewise, a hyphen is useful when you want to ‘re-cover’ your sofa rather than ‘recover’ from a bout of the flu. If your compound word looks odd because it doubles up a vowel or a consonant, a hyphen can help too. Hence: ‘antiintellectual’ rather than ‘antiintellectual’, or ‘sword-dance’ rather than ‘sworddance’.
It’s also worth keeping an eye out for the way in which a hyphen can resolve ambiguities. A man-eating fish is much more alarming than a man eating fish. Two-hundred-year-old books, two hundred-year-old books and two hundred year-old books will all fetch rather different prices at auction. Twenty-two odd socks and twenty-two-odd socks are different propositions: the first would embarrass a football team but keep its feet warm; the second might all match but could leave the star striker with nothing on one of his feet. After years of listening to the formulaic way in which nightly bulletins on the BBC World Service came to a close, Anthony Burgess wrote a novel called The End of the World News. Ghost hyphens.
A peculiarity of compounding hyphenation is that – particularly when you’re dealing with phrasal adjectives – syntax makes a difference. If the phrase is being used attributively – i.e. before the noun – you are more likely to hyphenate; if it’s being used predicatively, you are less so. This is often the case because the attributive version crunches a phrase containing different parts of speech into a single compound adjective.
So:
The storm was fast approaching.
Becomes
The fast-approaching storm.
In the first instance, ‘fast’ is an adverb modifying the participle ‘approaching’; in the second, both of them have combined to become an adjective: ‘fast-approaching’ is, in effect, a single word.
I should offer a caution about the banjaxing question of adverb-participle combos. There’s a widespread presumption against hyphenating this sort of phrase where the adverb ends in ‘-ly’.
So:
The widely admired society hostess
rather than
The widely-admired society hostess.
But the rule is not absolute, and you’ll see it flouted – to the extent that I’d call it more of a tendency than a rule. For a start, it defies all reason that ‘-ly’ words should have their own special category. Why should a well-upholstered chair have a hyphen but a badly upholstered chair not? You’d expect a lack of horsehair, not a lack of punctuation.
The one thing that most authorities do seem to agree on is that when you’re using these phrases predicatively, i.e. after the thing it qualifies, you definitely don’t hyphenate. You might get away with ‘a clumsily-punctuated essay’; but ‘your essay was clumsily-punctuated’ will strike most readers as, well, clumsy. Here, as above, the attributive version can be argued to make a one-thought adjective from a more straightforward verb phrase. If that doesn’t feel entirely reassuring, I apologise: but better honestly to mark a minefield than to send your troops through it at the double in a straight line.
The so-called ‘suspended hyphen’ is the one you use when you’re linking two or more compounds that share a base-word. It’s easier instanced than described: ‘nineteenth-century and twentieth-century oratory’ becomes ‘nineteenth- and twentieth-century oratory’. The suspended hyphen can introduce a precise distinction of meaning. My proofreader’s pencil hovered, recently, over the phrase ‘drink-and-drug-addled Afrikaners’. Did the author mean ‘drink- and drug-addled Afrikaners’? I decided not: he was describing not two groups with separate addlements, but one group addled by both drink and drugs.
Quite aside from their compounding role, hyphens are also used to indicate when a word is broken over two lines of text. Happily, arguments about where you should break the word (whether according to morphological structure or pronunciation), for ordinary users, are all but redundant: your word-processor will do it for you.
If you’re not sure whether to use a hyphen, Google can be your friend: not because it will give you a definitive answer, but because it might give you a sense of whether one usage is prevalent over another. Hyphenation in this case is a matter of trying to get a sense of where the language is at the moment. If you’re trying to write plainly you should go for the usage that is least likely to detain the reader by sticking out. That means finding the least controversial one.
An apostrophe does two main things.
1. It indicates possession.
a. Singular possessives take ’s: ‘The Pope’s nose.’ ‘Jane’s Addiction.’
b. Plural possessives ending in s take ’: ‘The dogs’ kennel’ (if you have more than one dog); ‘The workers’ canteen’ (if you have more than one worker).
c. Irregular plural possessives, where the plural doesn’t end in s, also take ’s: ‘The children’s book’; ‘The Women’s Equality Party.’
d. A school of thought has it that certain proper names ending in s can take a bare apostrophe for the possessive: ‘Jesus’ teachings’; ‘Moses’ law’. Personally, I don’t see the point: ‘Jesus’s teachings’ and ‘Moses’s law’ are perfectly well-formed and don’t open the possibility (silly though it might be on the face of it) that we have a number of people called Jesu or Mose going about teaching or laying down the law.
e. Pluralising family names seems to cause people all sorts of trouble, too. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that you have two neighbours: Mr and Mrs Park on one side, and Mr and Mrs Parks on the other. Over the fence to one side is ‘the Parks’ garden’; over the fence to the other is ‘the Parkses’ garden’. It’s a useful distinction to have and I see no reason to ignore it.
f. When possession is as it were shared by more than one noun, the apostrophe gloms onto the last in the series. ‘Mince and tatties’ delicious aroma’; ‘Rod, Jane and Freddy’s unorthodox lifestyle choice.’
g. It’s possible to construct instances that force you into a confoundingly awkward construction. If you are talking about the nave of St Peter’s Church, say, logic asks you to write ‘St Peter’s’s nave’. Common sense tells you to recast the sentence to avoid it.
h. Possessive pronouns follow their own rules. The possessive of ‘it’ is ‘its’, of ‘her’ ‘hers’, of ‘him’ ‘his’ and of ‘us’ ‘ours’. None of them use apostrophes. Think of them as preformed units.
i. Proper nouns and brand names follow no kind of rules at all. As David Crystal has pointed out, on the London Underground you can travel from Earl’s Court to Barons Court in one stop – and Harrods, Selfridges, Lloyds and Waterstones have all dropped their apostrophes over the years. You just have to treat them as proper nouns.
What the apostrophe, famously, does not do is indicate that something is in the plural. The so-called ‘greengrocer’s apostrophe’, as mentioned above, is the most notorious instance and is a great nourishment to the outrage of sticklers.
The sole exception I can think of is the (admittedly) ungainly use of the apostrophe when counting numbers of lower-case letters of the alphabet. ‘There are four i’s, four s’s and two p’s in “Mississippi”’ is awkward, but the alternative – ‘There are four is, four ss and two ps in “Mississippi”’ – is even worse.
2. It indicates where a letter or letters are missing.
These are constructions such as ‘I’m’ for ‘I am’ or ‘you’ve’ for ‘you have’; or, ubiquitously, ’s for ‘is’, as in ‘the game’s afoot’. This is very common in informal writing and less so in the more formal kind. So when deciding whether to use these contractions, keep in mind the register you’re aiming at.
These contractions can indicate more than one thing. ‘He’d’ can stand for ‘he would’ or ‘he had’; ‘he’s’ can stand for ‘he is’ or ‘he has’. Context will establish which one is meant; and, indeed, govern whether the contraction is possible at all. ‘He’d a very flatulent pig,’ you might recall of a visit to a friend who owned a farm. The same construction doesn’t work in the present tense. ‘He’s a very flatulent pig’ will be taken to refer to farmer rather than livestock: ‘he is’, rather than ‘he has’. On the other hand, ‘he’s gone to the vet to get that pig looked at’ contracts ‘he has’ into ‘he’s’ without trouble. Context is all.
As with hyphenation, the language adapts, and some contractions lose their apostrophes as they become established as words in their own right. We no longer – unless we want to sound particularly prissy – talk about ‘the ’cello’ (originally contracted from ‘violoncello’). And there are regular irregulars such as ‘shan’t’ for ‘shall not’ (not, or no longer, ‘sha’n’t’) and ‘won’t’ for ‘will not’.
A good few words and set phrases, though many slightly archaic, come with apostrophes built in. They follow the same logic of the apostrophe marking omission. ‘E’en’ for ‘even’, ‘fo’c’sle’ for ‘forecastle’, ‘fish ’n’ chips’ for ‘fish and chips’.
1. Round Brackets
Round brackets, first of all, mark out parentheses.* That is their day job. They hunt in pairs and they isolate material from the rest of the text around them, usually adding information that is incidental to the main meaning of the sentence. A very simple instance is:
The cat (Henry) sat on the mat.
The material in parentheses can be as short as a word-fragment, or as long as a self-contained sentence.
i. |
They decided to (re)consider my proposal. |
ii. |
I took the essential equipment (curling tongs, rubber gloves, a length of rope and a banjolele) for the job. |
iii. |
I had hoped that my lawyer would get me off on appeal (he was a graduate of a distinguished law school) but my hopes were disappointed. |
iv. |
There was nothing in the food cupboard when we got to the bothy. (The previous visitors must have cleaned it out.) |
The material in brackets can share the grammar of the main sentence, but doesn’t have to.
Therefore:
He threw the bathwater (and the baby in it) away: the baby in brackets is the object of ‘threw’.
He threw the bathwater (there was still a baby in it) away: the bit in brackets is an independent clause.
So the parenthetical material may or may not borrow grammatically from the sentence around it. The same freedom isn’t available when you reverse things. Whatever the material in brackets may be, and whatever form it takes, the sentence around it must be fully grammatical and self-contained in meaning without it. ‘The cat (and the dog) are sitting on the mat’ doesn’t work because if you take out the material in brackets you’re left with a singular subject and a plural verb. You can’t write: ‘The cat are sitting on the mat.’
According to the same logic, punctuation belonging to the main sentence remains outside the brackets. So:
If Freddy had only turned up (he didn’t), we would have had enough people to play bridge.
The bouncers warned us that if we didn’t leave the dancefloor we would be thrown out of the club (even though we’d done nothing wrong).
You can see, in iii, above, how an independent clause or sentence can be included in another sentence. In iv, you can see how a self-contained sentence can be placed in parenthesis within a paragraph. Note how in the latter case you punctuate the bit in brackets as a stand-alone sentence, with a capital letter at one end and a full stop at the other.
In the former, though, it has neither a full stop nor a capital letter. If it’s incorporated in another sentence, a parenthesis will never end in a full stop. So you would never write: ‘I had hoped that my lawyer would get me off on appeal (He was a graduate of a distinguished law school.) but my hopes were disappointed.’ Ellipsis dots, question marks and exclamation marks are acceptable, though. For example: ‘I had hoped that my lawyer would get me off on appeal (he was a graduate of a distinguished law school!) but my hopes were disappointed.’ Or: ‘I had hoped that my lawyer would get me off on appeal (wasn’t he a graduate of a distinguished law school?) but my hopes were disappointed.’
You’ll seldom find more than one or two sentences at most inside parentheses. The limits on working memory, as discussed earlier, make a sentence with a long multi-clause sentence buried inside it very tricky to parse. Your brain notes the open bracket, and is then forced to hold its breath until it meets the closing bracket and it can get on with working out the meaning of the main sentence. So if you have a lot of material in brackets, it’s always worth thinking about whether it can be better incorporated into the main text – either as a separate sentence or two.
So to give one of my earlier examples a longer parenthesis:
I had hoped that my lawyer would get me off on appeal (he was a graduate of a distinguished law school, having been summa cum laude at Harvard Law School in a year that included many who went on to become Appeal Court judges) but my hopes were disappointed.
That’s just a mess. If your parenthesis is that long you need to unpack it somehow.
I had hoped that my lawyer would get me off on appeal. After all, he did graduate summa cum laude from Harvard Law School in a year when many of his contemporaries went on to be Appeal Court judges. But my hopes were disappointed.
Or
I had a good lawyer: he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard Law School in a year when many of his contemporaries went on to be Appeal Court judges. So I had hoped to get off on appeal. No such luck.
Brackets can nest inside other brackets.
Lycidas was written by one of the greatest of the English poets (John Milton (1608–74), who also wrote Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671)).
That’s usually fine if the brackets-within-brackets are something as simple as the odd date. It’s generally regarded as bad style to do too much of that sort of thing, though. Your sentence will end up looking more like a mathematical formula than a chunk of English prose.
There are no fixed rules about how you present brackets-within-brackets. Not doing so is the best solution. If you absolutely have to – and you usually don’t – square or even curly brackets can be used for the inner parentheses, to make the hierarchy of nesting clearer. But, as I seem to have said more than once, avoiding brackets-within-brackets is a service to your reader.
Round brackets also have a number of other conventional uses. They enclose dates of publication for books or birth and death for humans, as above. They add supplementary information in some formal contexts: ‘Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont)’. They explain acronyms at first use: ‘DEFRA (the Department for the Environment, Fishing and Rural Affairs)’. And they can be used to indicate where a single word or phrase has been translated: ‘The aficionado (enthusiast) will go weekly to the corrida (bullfight).’
Singly, brackets can be used to tabulate numbered or lettered items in a list:
Well, it’s
2) For the show
3) To get ready
Now go, cat, go …
2. Square Brackets
Except when they’re being used, as mentioned above, in brackets-within-brackets, square brackets are mostly used for editorial interpolations. They indicate where a piece of quoted text has been amended or removed.
Here, for instance, is what Sir John Chilcot said in setting out the scope of his Inquiry into the Iraq War:
Our terms of reference are very broad, but the essential points, as set out by the Prime Minister and agreed by the House of Commons, are that this is an Inquiry by a committee of Privy Counsellors. It will consider the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July 2009, embracing the run-up to the conflict in Iraq, including the way decisions were made and actions taken, to establish, as accurately as possible, what happened and to identify the lessons that can be learned. Those lessons will help ensure that, if we face similar situations in future, the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner in the best interests of the country.
If you were quoting that in an essay or newspaper report, you would use square brackets with an ellipsis to indicate any material that doesn’t belong to the speaker, or that has been cut in the course of quotation. So you might end up with something like the following:
Sir John said that ‘[his inquiry’s] terms of reference are very broad […] It will consider the period from the summer of 2001 to the end of July 2009.’ He added that ‘[t]hose lessons will help ensure […] the government of the day is best equipped to respond to those situations in the most effective manner’.
The first bracketed phrase is one that the person quoting has put in for clarity. It is not Sir John’s. ‘Sir John said that “our terms of reference are very broad” …’ would be awkward – his ‘our’, integrated into the grammar of the journalist’s sentence, implicitly includes the reporter in Sir John’s first-person plural.
The second bracketed phrase – an ellipsis – indicates that between ‘broad’ and ‘It’ is some material that is not included in the quotation.
The third bracketed bit – perhaps more fastidious than ordinary journalism asks for; you’d probably simply put ‘those’ outside the quote marks – is indicating that the upper-case T in ‘those’ (it was originally the beginning of a sentence) has been made lower-case by the reporter to integrate it into his sentence, which is structured as a piece of indirect speech. (You wouldn’t want to write: ‘He added that “Those lessons will help …”’)
The fourth bracketed bit marks another elision. The […] stands for the chunk of text that reads: ‘that, if we face similar situations in future,’. This square-brackets-ellipsis use is particularly important. Even if what’s missing is a series of self-contained sentences, to be academically or journalistically scrupulous you need to indicate that text is missing.
Square brackets are also the best way of making clear that editorial commentary or information added to gloss a reference is separate from the text.
Nigel Farage [the leader of the UK Independence Party] has admitted that it was a ‘mistake’ to promise that £350 million a week would be spent on the NHS if the UK backed a Brexit vote. [The figure featured prominently in the Leave campaign’s promotional literature.]
If you’re quoting somebody who has made a spelling mistake or used a word eccentrically, it’s customary to write [sic] afterwards to indicate that the usage isn’t a transcription error. Sic gets italicised; the square brackets do not: ‘The Cranberries have a song on their second album called “Yeat’s [sic] Grave”.’
If you’re kinder, you might simply use square brackets to amend it. You couldn’t do that to the title of a song – the Cranberries are doomed, I’m afraid – but:
He wrote: ‘We’re pouring [sic] over the report’s proposals.’
Could also be rendered as follows to avoid the suggestion of a sneer:
He wrote: ‘We’re [poring] over the report’s proposals.’
3. Angle Brackets (or Chevrons) and Curly Brackets Neither of these have any regular use in English prose. They have various specialised functions in mathematics, musical notation, manuscript scholarship and computer programming. They need not detain us.
Quotation marks are, most simply, used to indicate direct speech or quoted material from written text.
‘What ho!’ I said.
‘What ho!’ said Motty.
‘What ho! What ho!’
‘What ho! What ho! What ho!’
After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.
Whether you use single quotation marks (‘What ho!’) or double quotation marks (“What ho!”) is a matter of house style or, in correspondence, personal preference. What matters above all is to be consistent.
Like brackets, quotation marks move around in pairs. Also like brackets, it’s possible to nest one set inside another – and, theoretically, to go on doing so. But unlike brackets it is a rule rather than an option to use a different punctuation mark to indicate one quote nesting inside another. If you are generally using double-quotes for speech, then you use single-quotes for speech-inside-speech.
I asked Mary what had happened. “He threw the custard pie at me, and then he shouted, ‘Take that, bandylegs!’,” she sobbed.
And vice versa:
I asked Mary what had happened. ‘He threw the custard pie at me, and then he shouted, “Take that, bandylegs!”,’ she sobbed.
If you do end up with a quotation-within-a-quotation-within-a-quotation, or even a quotation-within-a-quotation-within-a-quotation-within-a-quotation, convention has it that you alternate single and double quotes with each layer of the onion. For the reader’s ease and your own sanity, though, you don’t want to go too far down that route.
One resource you have available, particularly if your main quotation is a long one, is block quotation. This is where you separate the text from the introductory material not with quote marks, but by indenting it. This at least allows you to get a quotation-within-a-quotation-within-a-quotation (a commoner situation than you might think) without the awkwardness of using more than one pair of single- or double-quotation marks each.
Block quotation, in fact, is an attractive option when you have a long passage to quote, even if you don’t have difficulties with nested quotes within it. It sets the quoted passage clearly and easily out from the rest of the text, removes a layer of punctuation, and gives the reader a breathing space. That is why I’ve indented many of the examples I’m using here. Whether you italicise a block quote, whether you set it in a different typeface or type size, and the amount of space you leave around it are questions of house style or preference. Just be consistent about it.
As a rule, in anything approaching a formal context, you should be scrupulous in making sure that anything you place between quotation marks exactly reproduces the original quote. That means not just the right words in the right order and unexpurgated, but the same tense and parts of speech, same capitalisation and the same implied reference to anything outside the quotes. Newspapers, particularly in headlines, frequently bend this rule, to the annoyance of those they quote and to the confusion of the general public.
You have a choice between quoting as direct speech and quoting as reported, or indirect, speech. The distinction I’m making is a grammatical one to do with the sentences that frame the quoted material (the quoted material is always direct speech in and of itself). Compare:
He said: ‘I’m tired.’ (direct speech)
He said he was ‘tired’. (reported speech – his words are folded into your grammar)
The grammar of quoted material, where it’s incorporated into the flow of a sentence as indirect speech, needs to accord with the sentence as a whole. Let’s say you’re quoting General Patton’s speech to the Third Army as he prepared to roll up the Nazis at the end of the Second World War:
I don’t want any messages saying ‘I’m holding my position.’
We’re not holding a goddamned thing. We’re advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding anything except the enemy’s balls. We’re going to hold him by his balls and we’re going to kick him in the ass; twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all the time. Our plan of operation is to advance and keep on advancing. We’re going to go through the enemy like shit through a tinhorn.
You might write:
General Patton said his troops were ‘going to hold [the enemy] by his balls and […] kick him in the ass’.
The square brackets, there, are to ensure that the quote’s grammar fits in with the grammar of the sentence as a whole without falsifying it.
Without them, you’d be left either altering the quote or producing something as awkward as this:
General Patton said his troops were ‘going to hold him by his balls and we’re going to kick him in the ass’.
The problem with that is that the reader doesn’t know who ‘him’ refers to; and that ‘we’ puts the quote in the first person plural, which clashes with the third-person framing of it (‘his troops’ being the subject of the reported speech).
So if you wanted to avoid fussy square brackets you could revert to direct speech:
General Patton said: ‘We’re advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding anything except the enemy’s balls. We’re going to hold him by his balls and we’re going to kick him in the ass.’*
Using a colon (or a comma) to introduce a quote and letting the quote stand on its own as direct speech does solve that tricky problem of integrating the grammar. But it also means that often you’ll be forced to use a large and unwieldy chunk of text (so that it’s grammatical on its own), and you’ll have less chance to direct your reader to the important parts.
Very often you’ll only want to quote one or two words from something. That almost always means using reported speech. If someone delivers a dull and rambling 46-word sentence at his wedding in which he describes it as ‘the best night ever’, economy will often ask you to say something like, ‘He described it as “the best night ever”’ rather than quoting the whole shebang at length. That’s why the grammar-integration rule is important to understand.
As well as punctuating direct quotation, quote marks can be used to make clear you’re introducing a new or unfamiliar term. For instance:
The fancy word for an invented word is ‘neologism’.
You can also use quote marks to make clear that a particular usage or form of words (rather than, say, the specific words of a particular individual) is being used but not necessarily adopted by the author. It’s a way, in other words, of preserving the author’s neutrality:
Yesterday marked the opening day of ‘the greatest show on earth’.
We’re seeing the first legislative efforts to make ‘compassionate Conservatism’ a reality.
As an extension or distortion of that function, quote marks are sometimes used to indicate active scepticism, sarcasm or a certain archness of tone. In that role they’re sometimes called ‘scare quotes’. These are the on-the-page equivalent of making rabbit-ears in the air with your fingers when saying something you consider distasteful or absurd.
My nephew had me drive him to a ‘rave party’. I had the misfortune before I left to see him start ‘dancing’.
The homeopath I met at the party was very keen on ‘alternative medicine’.
These should be used with great caution. Scare quotes – particularly applied to relatively well-established usages – more often than not make the author seem sneering or fuddyduddy. They signal scepticism or distaste without arguing clearly and honestly for it, and they can make it look as if you’re having your cake and eating it: simultaneously saying something and disowning it. That said, they can also be used by good writers for comic effect. The late Auberon Waugh, in the hopes of annoying socialists, always used to refer to ‘the “working” classes’.
Quotation marks are also sometimes used to add emphasis, particularly in amateur sign-writing. This is, if you ask me, as close to downright erroneous as you are likely to get. Certainly, it’s bad style in standard written English – and it annoys people enough that some of them have even set up a blog (www.unnecessaryquotes.com) on the subject.
Recent instances include:
Check out our selection of ‘NEW’ Vermont cheeses to enjoy with your wine …
‘ESCAPE ROPE’ ‘EMERGENCY USE’ ‘ONLY’
We have plenty of ways to add emphasis as it is. Depending on context you could go for bold, italics, underlining or even, if you must, BLOCK CAPITALS. Quotation marks do something different.
Something that I’ve (I hope) exemplified and certainly implied, but not yet discussed, is the other trickiness with quotation marks. That is: how do they get on with the nearby punctuation?
For the most part, the rules hold: only material that belongs to the original quote goes between the quote marks, and that includes punctuation. For example:
‘I’m ruined!’ he wailed.
The exclamation mark belongs to the direct speech, and so remains inside the quote marks.
An exception is that when punctuating speech – particularly when the sentence begins with a direct quote – it’s conventional to use a comma inside the first closing set of punctuation marks.
‘We’re ready,’ he declared, ‘to take on every last one of them.’
Consistency and logic seem to suggest that that should read:
‘We’re ready’, he declared, ‘to take on every last one of them.
But in that format it does not. Not never. For what it’s worth, my reading of this irregularity is that – since the ‘he declared’ bit is as it were inserted into the middle of a complete sentence in quotes – it operates a bit like a parenthesis. It’s in enemy territory: the main structure of the sentence belongs to the quoted material.
In a sentence where the quoted material is clearly subordinate, you don’t see the same thing.
He said we were ‘nearly there’, so I unbuckled my seatbelt and waited for him to shout ‘we’re home’.
But as so often, there’s no absolutely consistent rule that can be applied. If we’re going to be strict about it, for instance, we could consider variations on the following phrase:
‘Is he an idiot?’ asked Dave.
‘He’s an idiot!’ said Dave.
‘He’s an idiot,’ repeated Dave.
In the first two of Dave’s expostulations, the punctuation is his own. In the third, Dave’s sentence ended with a full stop; but it has been replaced with a comma. Yet nobody writes:
‘He’s an idiot.’ said Dave.
It gets worse. One of the major differences between US usage and UK usage is that in the UK, when a full stop or a comma (this does not apply to other punctuation marks) finds itself next door to a quotation mark (i.e. a quotation ends a phrase or sentence), it remains outside.
In the US, the rule is the other way round. So in the UK, you’d write:
In her book on what she calls ‘guerrilla hairdressing’, Leslie writes that it’s ‘perfectly possible to style an asymmetric bob with garden shears’.
A US copyeditor would change that to the following:
In her book on what she calls ‘guerrilla hairdressing,’ Leslie writes that it’s ‘perfectly possible to style an asymmetric bob with garden shears.’
Even some American writers, such as Steven Pinker, and international organisations, such as Wikipedia, deplore the illogicality of this. Geoffrey Pullum has spoken wistfully of launching a Campaign for Typographical Freedom (‘a huge rally will take place at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C.’).
But as far as things stand, Americans are stuck with this. And we Brits have plenty of illogicalities to be going along with in any case.
‘What’s OJ Simpson’s email address?’ children used to joke in the early days of the internet. ‘Slash slash backslash escape.’ Not really very funny: nobody’s email address looked like that even back then. That said, the backslash (\) does have a use in computer programming – and nowhere much else.
The common-or-garden slash, aside from its various technical applications, occurs in a number of set phrases in ordinary English. It usually stands in for ‘or’ or ‘and’ or ‘-cum-’ or ‘per’. Hence ‘he/she’, ‘and/or’ in the first case; ‘Lowell/Berryman/Roethke generation’ in the second; ‘kitchen/diner’ or ‘live/work space’ in the third; and ‘45km/hr’ in the fourth.
It’s also sometimes used to indicate the difference between a numerator and a denominator in a fraction (‘5/6’), or to indicate a period spanning more than one year: ‘the 2015/16 tax year’. It’s handy, too, for punctuating line-breaks in poetry or song if you’re not setting them as block text: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to, but they do.’ Use a double-slash for stanza breaks.
Outside these specific, usually abbreviative, functions, you won’t find much call for it in continuous prose. And even in those uses, it has a slightly technical flavour: where you can unpack it into something more prosy, you’re well advised to do so.
These are less a punctuation mark than a layout convention. My discussion of enumeratio in ‘Using the Figures’ should cover them.
This is a form of punctuation that mostly belongs where it’s most popular: on social media. On Twitter, Instagram and other similar sites, you’ll find it used either to mark a contribution to a particular debate or a common thread:
@footiefan The referee needs glasses #cupfinal
Or, as a development of this use, to mark a comment:
@footiefan The referee needs glasses #blindref #visuallychallenged #refsawanker
This mark stands for ‘and’ in various informal or iconographic situations. Its shape originates from a highly stylised cursive rendering of the Latin word et, and its name is a contraction of ‘and per se and’ (which is how children in the nineteenth century, when it was the 27th letter of the alphabet, concluded the recitation of their ABC: ‘x, y, z and per se [by itself] and’).
It’s strictly a logogram (a character representing a word) rather than a punctuation mark. Business names may contain an ampersand, for instance: ‘Barnes & Noble’ or ‘Marks & Spencer’. They appear in certain compressed set phrases: ‘R&B’, or ‘B&B’. They are used by academics in citations for papers or books with more than one author, i.e. ‘quoted in Huddleston & Pullum (2002)’.
Some poets are attached to them, too. John Berryman wrote: ‘Sick at 6 & sick again at 9/ was Henry’s gloomy Monday morning oh.’ They are handy for keeping within the word limit in a tweet or fitting a newspaper headline into the available space. But ampersands don’t have a role in day-to-day prose of a more or less formal kind.
Is a smiley even a punctuation mark? That is a matter for scholars. Emoticons and emoji don’t have any function that I can make out in coordinating the grammar of a written sentence. However, they do offer a wonderfully subtle and various set of modal glosses (or, in less fancy terms, indications of tone) to the English words they accompany – which gives them at least a nodding relationship to marks such as the question or exclamation mark. ‘O_o’, for instance, seems to me to convey brilliantly that the preceding words are accompanied by the sort of hard stare pioneered by Paddington Bear.
They’ve been going for about 35 years – the original smiley being credited to Scott Fahlman, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, who suggested in 1982 that humorous posts on the departmental message-board should be marked with a sideways smiley face : - ) to indicate that they were jokes. It caught on.
Now, huge sets of pre-made emoticons (these pre-made cartoon sort are the ones usually referred to as emoji) are available to anybody with a smartphone. I have a soft spot for the old, home-made type, built from punctuation and other keyboard characters, however. Researching a piece on the subject a few years back I came across ‘d8=’ (‘Your pet beaver is wearing goggles and a hard hat’) ‘%\v’ (‘Picasso’) and ‘>-ii-< iiii’ (‘Go fetch mother. A giant crab is attacking the penguins.’) The existence on my phone’s keyboard of a walnut-whip-style cartoon dog-poo with boggly eyes doesn’t strike me as a great improvement on these, but heigh ho. Emojipedia.org has a pretty good list of what’s out there, along with ‘translations’, for the curious.
The grammar of emoji, such as it is, seems to specify that more often than not they come after the message that they comment on or expand on. ‘It’s my birthday!’ is usually followed by the little row of thumbs-up signs, cakes, jugs of ale and popping Champagne corks rather than preceded by it. Likewise, ‘I’ve been dumped’ is likely to come before the broken-heart icon; but need not always.
Nor, come to that, do they automatically need to gloss written text. Sometimes they can stand alone in reacting to it – which is more or less what Facebook formalised when in 2015 it augmented its ‘Like’ button with six emoji representing ‘Love’, ‘Yay’, ‘Ha ha’, ‘Wow’, ‘Sad’ and ‘Angry’. Many people find it fun – and intellectually testing, in a crossword-puzzle kind of way – to conduct entire conversations in emoji. In July 2016 a restaurant in West London published its menu in emoji form, which will, depending on your disposition, strike you as either a total riot or a hitherto unnoticed horseman of the Apocalypse.
They are only advisable in informal communication: text messages, tweets and occasionally email. They are likely to remain so, whatever the fears of those who imagine these things will soon be popping up in university essays. In part, they participate in the realm of what linguists call ‘phatic’ communication:* they tell you what sort of conversation you’re having, i.e. the sort in which people use emoji. And those conversations remind us that our semiotic resources, of which standard English is just one, are gloriously bountiful, constantly enriched and contribute to our gaiety as well as to our understanding of the world.
* As ever, in literary and informal contexts all bets are off.
* Making A Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation (Profile, 2015).
† Groan.
* According to the actor Christopher Walken, in his introduction to the KISS Guide to Cat Care (2001), ‘I’ve heard that the symbol we use to signify a question (?) is, in origin, an Egyptian hieroglyph that represents a cat as seen from behind. I wonder if the Egyptians were expressing suspicion or an inquiring mind … or something else?’ I wonder, too. There’s no evidence I know of to support this, but since it’s a) Christopher Walken and b) Christopher Walken writing an introduction to some cat manual and c) turns an ordinary full stop into a cat’s bottom … well, it’s worth passing on.
† Sometimes the computer will even have inserted the recipient’s first name. Sometimes the author – who you will never have met – will ask every one of his or her several hundred victims how their weekend was.
* Wordsworth, for instance, wrote: ‘She lived unknown, and few could know/ When Lucy ceased to be;/ But she is in her grave, and, oh,/ The difference to me!’ The opening of Beowulf is usually punctuated ‘Hwæt!’, i.e. ‘Listen up!’
* Absinthe makes you mad.
* This wasn’t true three hundred years ago. They were bastards for dashes in the eighteenth century. As I said: punctuation style changes.
* Dialogue that just trails off rather than being interrupted is usually indicated by an ellipsis.
* NB: When they say ‘brackets’ Brits usually mean round brackets, and Americans usually mean square brackets. Americans call round brackets ‘parentheses’. Happily, what those marks actually do is the same on both sides of the Atlantic. In the present book I am aiming to reserve the terms ‘parenthesis’ and ‘parentheses’ not for any specific punctuation marks, but for the held-apart-from-the-main-text material that goes into them.
* To be absolutely scrupulous, you could argue, this full stop should be placed outside the quote mark, since the original is punctuated with a semicolon. However, when you’re quoting the spoken word punctuation is already by definition an approximation. General Patton did not speak that semicolon. So in tidying it that way you don’t, I think, falsify it. Were this a written passage from an official document, particularly one in which a sentence expressly did not end where the quotation ends, you should be much more careful about using sentence-final punctuation within the quote mark.
* See ‘Audience-Awareness, Or, Baiting the Hook’ for a fuller discussion of this.