"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."
- Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots and Leaves
We take courtesies and good manners for granted without realising how difficult or different life would have been without them -like people forming a queue to buy a ticket or a burger, or the usher guiding you to your seat at the multiplex. Depending on whether you are in Patiala, Benaras or Kolkata, the thoughtfully placed cultural markers like liquor vends, paan shops and Mishti shops ( add Homeo Halls with the last mentioned) are a form of courtesy. They serve to guide one to the correct address-otherwise we could all be getting lost and entering into wrong boudoirs and privies. Imagine Rest Rooms without Male- Female signs ( frankly I know quite a few who would rather have them without!) or roads without designated bus stops ( though this does not really matter much in many parts of India), buses without their numbers, and even people without names. 
That is why I consider the description of punctuation, in a style book of a national newspaper of England, as " a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling", the most appropriate. Lynne Truss has succinctly observed that it is not an accident that the word "punctilious "(attentive to formality or etiquette") comes from the same original root word as punctuation. But punctuation was not always so detailed and helpful.In the texts of antiquity with the scriptio continua system, there was hardly any punctuation. The earliest alphabetic writing did not have capitalisation, spaces, vowels and very few punctuation marks since writing was limited to a narrow range of topics like recording business transactions.
Till the advent of printing, punctuation initiatives revolved primarily around placing visual clues of different shapes to aid theatre actors to correctly pause between their lines or assist in reading aloud the Bible or chant with appropriate voice modulation the various liturgy. Now much as I don't want to inflict the details of these punctuation marks of Antiquity or the Medieval Ages on you, I know there are a few who will tug at my shirt to mention them. So here goes this illustrative, if not exhaustive, list for those knowledge seekers with dogged persistence. Others can surely skip .
The punctuation marks of Antiquity include the Greek system or thesis of three vertically arranged dots or punctus for various lengths of pauses (subdistinctio, media distinctio, distinctio), paragraphos ( gamma) to mark beginning of sentences, marginal diples ( or "double" which was an arrow-shaped character) to mark quotations, and koronis to signal the end of major sections. Later on the Latin, Irish, Anglo Saxonic and Carolingian scribes added the littera notabilior which was an early version of initial capitalisation; a series of marks for different lengths of pause like punctus, punctus elevatus, punctus versus, punctus interrogavitus , punctus and virgula suspensiva ( which was a forward slash with a midpoint dot to denote the briefest of pause; and positura, shaped like 7, which functioned quite like the koronis) .
It was only when the veil was lifted from the Dark Ages that punctuation took the next step forward to burst beyond its pause/modulation functions and assist in making making the syntax clearer and intelligible. The Dark Age, with its slavish aping of venerated texts, militated against any radical tweaking by punctuation marks - such a thing could even change the sense of the religious text significantly. Examples abound but this time I am not giving in to the shirt tuggers.
With the dawn of Renaissance and the invention of the printing press there was mass printing of books necessitating the introduction of standardised punctuation marks. Books were now meant for reading and understanding and not for mechanical moving of lips and intoning. That is why, much as I doff my hat to the inventor of the printing machine, I bow before a Venetian printer Aldus Manutius the Elder ( 1450- 1515). And talking of people like Aldus and such geniuses like Michelangelo, Leornado da Vinci, Raphael, Fillippo Brunelleschi, et al, I feel the Almighty, felt remorseful for the Black Death, for the Dark Ages which saw the economic and cultural deterioration of Europe and the cloistering of large number of men and women in dark monasteries shackled by vows of celibacy and condemned to chant the Scriptures from Matins to Compline.In a fit of divine remorse, He unleashed an unprecedentedly brilliant array of people in these two- three hundred years.
Anyway, let us come back to Manutius who invented the italics, semicolon and along with his grandson, of the same name, lowered the virgule and curved it to make it look like the modern comma. The duo also put the colons and full stops and the modern dash. When Manutius the Younger was done with, he could state that the purpose of punctuation was the clarification of the syntax.
The apostrophe made its humble beginning as a mark for dropped letters till the printers in the 17th century found some other uses for it and burdened it with a lot of jobs to do. Till 18th century, the quotation was used only to moralize.The question mark morphed into its present seahorse profile from the 8th century Punctus interrogativus. The brackets came in four shapes at different times: round ( ) initially called "lunulae" by Erasmus in 16th century; square brackets [ ]; brace brackets { }; angle < > . They were also the first punctuation marks to be derived not from Greek or Latin but a German source.Introduced by the Humanist printers in the 15th century, the Exclamation mark even has a rhyme devoted to it:
This stop denotes our Suddain Admiration,
Of what we Read, or Write, or giv Relation,
And is always cal'd an Exclamation.
If punctuation can be taken as a courtesy, then surely it is found lacking in a large number of people. There is no denying the fact that the use of punctuation has been compounded and confounded in no small measure by serious disagreement amongst men and women of letters.Humorist James Thurber and his editor at New Yorker Harold Ross in the 1930s and 1940s differed over the excessive use of comma. Peter Carey won a Booker Prize in 2001 for a book that contained no commas at all ( True History of the Kelly Gang).
There are writers who worship the semi colon and those who dismiss it, James Joyce preferred the colon while PG Wodehouse did without it; Umberto Eco wrote one book without semi colon. The semi colon has fallen out of favour with newspapers. George Bernard Shaw once ripped into TE Lawrence calling him "no more to be trusted with a pen than a child with a torpedo" and that "you throw colons about with an unhinged mind". Gertrude Stein was a veritable enemy of punctuation marks like the question mark, comma, exclamation point and quite a few others.
There are writers who worship the semi colon and those who dismiss it, James Joyce preferred the colon while PG Wodehouse did without it; Umberto Eco wrote one book without semi colon. The semi colon has fallen out of favour with newspapers. George Bernard Shaw once ripped into TE Lawrence calling him "no more to be trusted with a pen than a child with a torpedo" and that "you throw colons about with an unhinged mind". Gertrude Stein was a veritable enemy of punctuation marks like the question mark, comma, exclamation point and quite a few others.
But more than these differences , I think punctuation has been sadly neglected as a subject of teaching. For almost 25 years starting 1960, punctuation was not taught in British schools as a result of which most would fail to use correct punctuation marks in the sentence:
Charles the First walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off.
"Come inside for CD's, Video's, DVD's and Book's" is a shop sign in England; "Two Weeks Notice" is the name of a film without an apostrophe; "Fan's fury at stadium inquiry" screams a Newspaper placard about a large mob of fans, while it was in ITV1show Popstars that a singing group called Hear'Say surfaced.The itses - its and it's- keep getting mixed up with alarming frequency and dead certainty in England which makes you wonder why the sticklers still have hair left on their pate. One Keith Waterhouse operated an Association for the Abolition of the Aberrant Apostrophe in the Daily Mirror.
People have been found to use commas quite stupidly as in " Leonara walked on her head, a little higher than usual" and "The convict said the judge is mad". The American papers have even taken to substituting the word "and" with a comma: "UK study spurns al-Qaeda, Iraq link" and "Mother, three sons die in farm fire". As a matter of fact, there are at least seventeen rules for the comma- and ten for the hyphen. Dropping the question mark as in "Who framed Roger Rabbit" has become quite common.
The understanding of different types of verbs, clauses and phrases is essential to get the colon and semicolon right. The semicolon is routinely misused as a colon, used as an equivalent of a comma and mixed up with the dash. More often than not, people are unclear when to place the comma, full stop, question mark and exclamation mark inside the quotation marks and when outside. Besides, there are some fundamental differences in the British and American styles.
I don't blame anyone for the punctuation mayhem that is let loose all over. I could even go on to write separately on the punctuation anarchy unleashed by the apostrophe , the comma and the hyphen. Actually, the English language is fairly difficult and I have earlier dwelt at length on the oddities of English pronunciation , the potentiality of mischief by silent letters and the confusing non-phonemic orthography.
For women, punctuation has been so singularly difficult that unless one sacrifices the adolescent essentials like necking on the benches on the river fronts of Thames, Ganga, Narmada, Hooghly or Damodar, or the joys of teen pregnancy, one doesn't stand a chance of learning punctuation.
And if you think I am making this up, just shut up! I quote none other than Lynn Truss from her book Eats Shoots & Leaves , a book I strongly recommend you must read. Here she is, reminiscing about her grammar school days which bordered around the time girls in India were publicly smudging Rajesh Khanna's car with lipsticks in public and marrying his photos in private. Here are three of them:
"While other girls were out with their boyfriends on Sunday afternoons , getting their necks disfigured by love bites, I was at home with the wireless listening to an Ian Messiter quiz called Many a Slip, in which erudite and amusing contestants spotted grammatical errors in pieces of prose."
"Around the same time, when other girls of my age were attending the Isle of Wight Festival and having abortions, I bought a copy of Eric Partridge's Usage and Abusage and covered it in sticky- backed plastic so that it would last a lifetime ."
".. am now absolutely kicking myself that i never volunteered to have his ( Aldus Manutius the Elder's) babies."
People have even posited an inverse relationship between proficiency in English and libido but I think that is being quite facetious . I just feel so relieved for men that not many women made such a sacrifice and have not been self-abnegating.
People have even posited an inverse relationship between proficiency in English and libido but I think that is being quite facetious . I just feel so relieved for men that not many women made such a sacrifice and have not been self-abnegating.
