Read Online THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS by John Scalzi - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Scalzi
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assuring that it will be exactly so): It's something you almost certainly do not think about on a day-to-day basis, but whose presence you would also almost certainly miss if it were to disappear tomorrow. without punctuation and that includes capital letters nottomentionspacing things would become substantially more difficult to read its amazing that civilization managed to get through a couple thousand years without it at all or managing it haphazardly at best
Or perhaps not. Punctuation assumes people want to be able to read things; the desire to read assumes literacy. For most of our time here on Earth, most people couldn't read (even now, I'd guess global literacy hovers at the 50/50 mark); for these people punctuation is beside the point, like a slide rule would be to 13th century Bedouins.
For those that could read, what punctuation there was, up until the 17th century, was used exclusively for pacing oratory. Up until that time, most things written down were meant to be declaimed in some manner or another; punctuation marks told you when to pause or to take a breath (people who declaim for a living would otherwise tal k until their lungs collapsed. C onfirm this by chatting up a stage actor sometime). A comma was a short pause, a semi-colon longer still; and a colon the longest pause of all: It still works that way, of course, though each of these marks carries added responsibilities. Should you ever riff through your Shakespeare, use these marks as your guide as you orate. You will instantly become a better Shakespearian actor (this does not mean you will become a good Shakespearian actor. Just better).
Thus some mild irony in the fact that our current understanding of punctuation comes from a contemporary of Shakespeare, and indeed, his closest literary competitor at the time: Playwright Ben Jonson, whose posthumously published English Grammar codified the concept of syntactical punctuation. Beyond allowing actors an infusion of oxygen, it also allowed for clarity in the written language though use of punctuation to demarcate important stops, detours and reroutings of thought. One wonders how Jonson would feel knowing that hardly one English speaker in five hundred could name one of his plays ( Volpone -- there, now you're one of them), but that every time one of us scrawls a sentence, we're doing it according to his basic precepts. Literary immortality is a strange and fickle mistress.
But you take immortality where you may. And in this case, it's a practical immortality; these days a writer measures his or her punctuation as much as he or she measures words. Indeed, how one uses punctuation is often as indentifiable a mark of a writer's personal style as how he or she strings his words together. The famous San Francisco columnist Herb Caen was famous for his ellipses....which gave the impression that his collection of random sentences were somehow related to each other...even when they were not....meanwhile, Hemingway rarely used anything but a period because his terse biting prose so compactly entered the mind that other punctuation was not necessary. (Or so he thought.) Readers may be able to discern some habits of punctuation even in my own writing; for example, I am inordinately fond of semi-c olons (not to mention parenthese s).
This is not to say punctuation has been set in stone since the 17th century. Just as we don't wander about speaking Shakespeare's English on the street (unless we're theater geeks, in which case we should prepare to be beaten on by the jocks during lunch break), neither do we punctuate exactly as we did in the past. Punctuation is still on the move, as each era and medium places its own mark (get it? Huh?) on the format. In the 18th century, for example, every subordinate clause, and separable phrase, was separated by a comma, whether, in fact, the sentence, as a whole, needed that many commas, or not. This may explain why so much writing of the time gives modern readers a
Or perhaps not. Punctuation assumes people want to be able to read things; the desire to read assumes literacy. For most of our time here on Earth, most people couldn't read (even now, I'd guess global literacy hovers at the 50/50 mark); for these people punctuation is beside the point, like a slide rule would be to 13th century Bedouins.
For those that could read, what punctuation there was, up until the 17th century, was used exclusively for pacing oratory. Up until that time, most things written down were meant to be declaimed in some manner or another; punctuation marks told you when to pause or to take a breath (people who declaim for a living would otherwise tal k until their lungs collapsed. C onfirm this by chatting up a stage actor sometime). A comma was a short pause, a semi-colon longer still; and a colon the longest pause of all: It still works that way, of course, though each of these marks carries added responsibilities. Should you ever riff through your Shakespeare, use these marks as your guide as you orate. You will instantly become a better Shakespearian actor (this does not mean you will become a good Shakespearian actor. Just better).
Thus some mild irony in the fact that our current understanding of punctuation comes from a contemporary of Shakespeare, and indeed, his closest literary competitor at the time: Playwright Ben Jonson, whose posthumously published English Grammar codified the concept of syntactical punctuation. Beyond allowing actors an infusion of oxygen, it also allowed for clarity in the written language though use of punctuation to demarcate important stops, detours and reroutings of thought. One wonders how Jonson would feel knowing that hardly one English speaker in five hundred could name one of his plays ( Volpone -- there, now you're one of them), but that every time one of us scrawls a sentence, we're doing it according to his basic precepts. Literary immortality is a strange and fickle mistress.
But you take immortality where you may. And in this case, it's a practical immortality; these days a writer measures his or her punctuation as much as he or she measures words. Indeed, how one uses punctuation is often as indentifiable a mark of a writer's personal style as how he or she strings his words together. The famous San Francisco columnist Herb Caen was famous for his ellipses....which gave the impression that his collection of random sentences were somehow related to each other...even when they were not....meanwhile, Hemingway rarely used anything but a period because his terse biting prose so compactly entered the mind that other punctuation was not necessary. (Or so he thought.) Readers may be able to discern some habits of punctuation even in my own writing; for example, I am inordinately fond of semi-c olons (not to mention parenthese s).
This is not to say punctuation has been set in stone since the 17th century. Just as we don't wander about speaking Shakespeare's English on the street (unless we're theater geeks, in which case we should prepare to be beaten on by the jocks during lunch break), neither do we punctuate exactly as we did in the past. Punctuation is still on the move, as each era and medium places its own mark (get it? Huh?) on the format. In the 18th century, for example, every subordinate clause, and separable phrase, was separated by a comma, whether, in fact, the sentence, as a whole, needed that many commas, or not. This may explain why so much writing of the time gives modern readers a
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