living-room’?” And his answer was probably one of the loveliest things ever said about punctuation. “This particular comma,” Thurber explained, “was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”
Why the problem? Why the scope for such differences of opinion? Aren’t there rules for the comma, just as there are rules for the apostrophe? Well, yes; but you will be entertained to discover that there is a significant complication in the case of the comma. More than any other mark, the comma draws our attention to the mixed origins of modern punctuation, and its consequent mingling of two quite distinct functions:
1 To illuminate the grammar of a sentence
2 To point up – rather in the manner of musical notation – such literary qualities as rhythm, direction, pitch, tone and flow
This is why grown men have knock-down fights over the comma in editorial offices: because these two roles of punctuation sometimes collide head-on – indeed, where the comma is concerned, they do it all the time. In 1582, Richard Mulcaster’s The First Part of the Elementarie (an early English grammar) described the comma as “a small crooked point, which in writing followeth some small branch of the sentence, & in reading warneth vs to rest there, & to help our breth a little”. Many subsequent grammars of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries make the same distinction. When Ross and Thurber were threatening each other with ashtrays over the correct way to render the star-spangled banner, they were reflecting a deep dichotomy in punctuation that had been around and niggling people for over four hundred years. On the page, punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum the tune.
If only we hadn’t started reading quietly to ourselves. Things were so simple at the start, beforegrammar came along and ruined things. The earliest known punctuation – credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium (librarian at Alexandria) around 200 BC – was a three-part system of dramatic notation (involving single points at different heights on the line) advising actors when to breathe in preparation for a long bit, or a not-so-long bit, or a relatively short bit. And that’s all there was to it. A comma , at that time, was the name of the relatively short bit (the word means in Greek “a piece cut off”); and in fact when the word “comma” was adopted into English in the 16th century, it still referred to a discrete, separable group of words rather than the friendly little tadpoley number-nine dot-with-a-tail that today we know and love. For a millennium and a half, punctuation’s purpose was to guide actors, chanters and readers-aloud through stretches of manuscript, indicating the pauses, accentuating matters of sense and sound, and leaving syntax mostly to look after itself. St Jerome, who translated the Bible in the 4th century, introduced a system of punctuation of religious texts per cola et commata (“by phrases”), to aid accurate pausing when reading aloud. Cassiodorus, writing in the 6th century insouthern Italy for the guidance of trainee scribes, included punctuation in his Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum , recommending “clear pausing in well-regulated delivery”. I do hope Harold Pinter knows about all this, by the way; who would have thought the pause had such a long and significant history?
Most of the marks used by those earnest scribes look bizarre to us now, of course: the positura , a mark like a number 7, which indicated the end of a piece of text; the sinister mark like the little gallows in a game of hangman that indicated the start of a paragraph (paragraphs weren’t indented until much later); and, significantly here, the virgula suspensiva , which looked like our present-day solidus or forward slash (/), and was used to mark the briefest pause or hesitation. Perhaps the key thing one
Why the problem? Why the scope for such differences of opinion? Aren’t there rules for the comma, just as there are rules for the apostrophe? Well, yes; but you will be entertained to discover that there is a significant complication in the case of the comma. More than any other mark, the comma draws our attention to the mixed origins of modern punctuation, and its consequent mingling of two quite distinct functions:
1 To illuminate the grammar of a sentence
2 To point up – rather in the manner of musical notation – such literary qualities as rhythm, direction, pitch, tone and flow
This is why grown men have knock-down fights over the comma in editorial offices: because these two roles of punctuation sometimes collide head-on – indeed, where the comma is concerned, they do it all the time. In 1582, Richard Mulcaster’s The First Part of the Elementarie (an early English grammar) described the comma as “a small crooked point, which in writing followeth some small branch of the sentence, & in reading warneth vs to rest there, & to help our breth a little”. Many subsequent grammars of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries make the same distinction. When Ross and Thurber were threatening each other with ashtrays over the correct way to render the star-spangled banner, they were reflecting a deep dichotomy in punctuation that had been around and niggling people for over four hundred years. On the page, punctuation performs its grammatical function, but in the mind of the reader it does more than that. It tells the reader how to hum the tune.
If only we hadn’t started reading quietly to ourselves. Things were so simple at the start, beforegrammar came along and ruined things. The earliest known punctuation – credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium (librarian at Alexandria) around 200 BC – was a three-part system of dramatic notation (involving single points at different heights on the line) advising actors when to breathe in preparation for a long bit, or a not-so-long bit, or a relatively short bit. And that’s all there was to it. A comma , at that time, was the name of the relatively short bit (the word means in Greek “a piece cut off”); and in fact when the word “comma” was adopted into English in the 16th century, it still referred to a discrete, separable group of words rather than the friendly little tadpoley number-nine dot-with-a-tail that today we know and love. For a millennium and a half, punctuation’s purpose was to guide actors, chanters and readers-aloud through stretches of manuscript, indicating the pauses, accentuating matters of sense and sound, and leaving syntax mostly to look after itself. St Jerome, who translated the Bible in the 4th century, introduced a system of punctuation of religious texts per cola et commata (“by phrases”), to aid accurate pausing when reading aloud. Cassiodorus, writing in the 6th century insouthern Italy for the guidance of trainee scribes, included punctuation in his Institutiones Divinarum et Saecularium Litterarum , recommending “clear pausing in well-regulated delivery”. I do hope Harold Pinter knows about all this, by the way; who would have thought the pause had such a long and significant history?
Most of the marks used by those earnest scribes look bizarre to us now, of course: the positura , a mark like a number 7, which indicated the end of a piece of text; the sinister mark like the little gallows in a game of hangman that indicated the start of a paragraph (paragraphs weren’t indented until much later); and, significantly here, the virgula suspensiva , which looked like our present-day solidus or forward slash (/), and was used to mark the briefest pause or hesitation. Perhaps the key thing one
Similar Books
