Friday 6 April 2012

What's this? It could be — Yes! An essay about punctuation-type stuff: part one




Throughout most of the history of written language, people made do without punctuation.
In this context, “people” refers mainly to ancient Egyptian priests, who seem to have kept a tight hold on the whole recording of words trick as a trade secret for several thousand years. The only regular graphic device they used to distinguish one group of symbols from those around it was the cartouche, an elegant oval around the name of the pharaoh. (And lucky for us they did — the cartouches on the Rosetta Stone proved a key clue for matching the hieroglyphic text with the adjacent Greek translation and deciphering the whole language.)
Egyptian hieroglyphic writing used a convoluted system of word, syllable and sound symbols a lot like modern Japanese, only worse. Other people around the Mediterranean adapted and modified the system, finding a system based mostly on word sounds easier to learn, since it requires fewer symbols. You only need a few dozen sound or syllable characters to represent a spoken language, but you need thousands of characters if each word gets its own.
So your Phoenicians (resemblance to “phonetic” a funny coincidence), Hebrews and Etruscans eventually got things down to one letter per sound, more or less. They didn’t punctuate or bother to put a space between words. Vowels — who needs ’em?
Cn y rd ths sntnc? Nt tht hrd, rlly. Asforwordspacing,thinkofallthenewsprintwecouldsavewithoutit.
When the Greeks took over the one symbol per sound, or alphabetic, system, they introduced written vowels. Linguists do not agree about whether that happened through a conscious act of invention or as who should say organically.
A librarian at Alexandria gets credit for introducing punctuation in the sense we understand it, around 200 BCE. His inventions included the question mark, except it looked like a semicolon, and written Greek still goes with that.
The rest of this fascinating story plays out through medieval times into the period after Gutenberg. I will leave that for another time, so we can anticipate the invention of lower case letters and other wonders.
Except for this conundrum that has nagged me for decades: I found a source about punctuation that said the Latin question mark (?) was adapted from neumes, a system of squiggles written over words in liturgical chant books to indicate pitch, before the invention of staff lines. So, the theory goes, scribes copied the rising pitch neume to represent the rising pitch of a spoken question.
That theory has two problems. First, not all spoken questions have rising pitch, across languages or within single languages. Second, I found a history of neumes that said they developed from written punctuation, such as the question mark.
The paleographer who sorts this out wins the Hawk and Handsaw Prize for 2012.
For today, I just want to offer some typographic terminology for general use. People throw around he word “dash” pretty loosely and mostly don’t like saying “hyphen,” and sometimes call a hyphen a dash, bless their hearts. To printers and copy editors, dashes and hyphens have distinct appearances and uses.
Typesetters call dashes “m-dashes” and hyphens “n-dashes” because of their set width, equal to the width of the letter m or n in that font.
The short version of proper use: hyphens within a compound word, dashes to separate thoughts.
The short version of how to make the world a better place: lay off the dashes.
I have noticed a tendency for people to use dashes as a universal punctuation, replacing commas, periods, semicolons and parentheses. Newspapers have contributed to the trend by preferring paired dashes where parentheses have served for a few hundred years.
Where the dash serves correctly to separate thoughts, people seem to want it to add suspense or drama. I can’t agree that the little line has that much mojo, but even if it does, I see it far too much.
This goes under my “one gimmick per day” rule, which I shall expound more on later, along with scare quotes, colons and — heaven help me — capitalization.
Ceterum censeo “utilize” esse delendam.

Thursday 29 March 2012

Quality advice to avoid issues


Richard Jewell (1962-2007)

I dedicate this week’s column to the late Richard Jewel, a regular cop who earned months of public abuse for staying alert, doing his job and saving lives during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
Some would say he performed quality work when faced with a potential situation.
I would not.
While I am not above wasting ink on ideas of dubious value, I draw the line at wasting ink on words that convey nothing at all.
Alas, because of the way people use “quality” and “situation,” I end up using a lot of ink drawing that line.
In the case of “quality,” blame for the misuse — as for so much deterioration of American diction — likely rests with advertisers. A thorough search of the archives might even pinpoint what ad for which product started it.
I imagine a Lucky Strike-puffing copywriter on Madison Avenue deleting one little word on his way to a four-hour martini lunch on Tuesday, so the handbills printed Wednesday proclaimed “For a quality washday soap, buy Sudzo!” instead of “For a high quality washday soap, buy Dynokleen!” (Did I miss my calling, or what?)
Was that writer just trying to save a tiny bit of ad space, or was he consciously and sneakily avoiding any commitment as to whether the “quality” in question was high or low, letting the targeted consumers fill in that crucial bit based solely on the number and size of the following exclamation points, or on the beatific look of satisfaction worn by a June Cleaver doppelganger?
Likewise “situation,” although in this case I blame the military-trained butchers of English. We are well served if they can render our enemies half as impotent as they make their prose.
A high-ranking spokeshuman probably intended to avoid alarming the citizenry by leaving out words like “dangerous” and “volatile” when describing an unexpected encounter between heavily armed, hostile forces at a sensitive time and place: “We have a potential situation developing along the Hungarian border.”
Which left us all praying that the Soviets didn’t maneuver us into the losing side of a potential situation gap.
So did Jewell “perform quality work when faced with a potential situation”? Certainly, but so do we all, every day, whether that work is outstanding, average or sub-par, and regardless of whether the outcome proves glorious, tragic or completely inconsequential.
The sentiment intended is, of course, that an alert police officer performed effective work that prevented a problem. The words “effective” and “problem” carry the moral value as part of their fundamental denotation — no inference, supposition or wishy-washing needed.
Several other words get this treatment. “Issue” comes to mind, as in “That family has issues,” where we start forgetting to wink at the neutral word so that it soon has to lug around the negative connotation wherever it goes.
As my fellow high school band trumpeter John Williamson paraphrased in our senior yearbook, “Of all the schools I’ve ever been to, this is certainly one of them.” (Hi, John.)
Now to the rhetorical legacy of Officer Jewell and the Centennial Olympic bombing.
I can’t name the specific culprit who originally saddled us with “person of interest.” I did a little digging, but couldn’t divine whether the phrase came from the media or the police first. They certainly share guilt for its spread in the early stages.
The police latched onto it because it seemed to let them say “suspect” without taking moral or legal responsibility for naming someone a suspect. The media let them get away with it.
Both the media and the police continue playing this spineless game. This week The Associated Press moved a story about a person of interest arriving in Anchorage from Texas, presumably as an honored traveling companion of the federal marshals who surrounded him the whole way.
The moral worthlessness of “person of interest” as a euphemism stands clear. To an extent, case law rejects it as legally worthless, too. Neither police nor news outlets can stave off a libel judgment simpy by arguing they never called someone a suspect.
I will call the inventor of the phrase a poltroon to their face and gladly embrace any consequences — pistols or swords, your call. Meanwhile the rest of us should stop letting it slide.
But maybe time will take care of it. Euphemisms have a way of deteriorating back to the original negative connotation their first users aimed at suppressing.
This effect can use up a whole string of words as one after another sinks into vulgarity. Thus the French, over a few centuries, have worked their way through every likely word for “kiss,” because sooner or later each one ends up meaning a far more intimate interaction.
See, I can euphemize, too.
I conclude with this sociolinguistic conundrum: Does the increasing acceptance of blasphemies such as “hell” and “damn” in polite speech during the last half century represent an opposite tendency for those words to lose a semantic taint, or does it just means the society throwing them around no longer abjures Satan and all his works?
Now there’s a damn quality issue.
Ceterum censeo “utilize” esse delendam.