On the back of the flier is a review from The Independent saying that they were "Unashamedly literate". I therefore can't help but wonder what that apostrophe is doing before the word round. I mean, really, do they think that round is a shortening of around? It's enough to make you 'cross.
The habit, though, is surprisingly common. I once saw an advertisement for an exhibition at the British Museum that was continuing 'til April.
So let's be very clear: round is not a shortening of around, to is not a shortening of unto and till is not a shortening of until. If you want to argue it historically (and I suspect you do), till has been around since 800, until didn't crop up ti'll 1200.
There's something shuddersome about errors such as these. To be lazy is no disgrace, indeed it's rather charming. But to pin vain apostrophes on innocent words suggests such smugness, such deluded superiority, such busy-bodied meddling that it makes you squirm.
It's worse than adding an apostrophe to [omni]bus, or [tele]phone, or [news]papers: worse because it has the same level of pedantry, but without any knowledge.
I haven't been able to look at the British Museum the same way 'since.
Not enough 'books
N.B. It is the policy of the Inky Fool never to criticise what's known as the Grocer's A'postrophe, on the basis that I've no idea how to run a shop. It is only those who really should, or claim to, know better who come in for stick.
In an idle moment, in an idle hour, during an idle life, I picked up a copy of Open Skies, Closed Minds. It's by a civil servant who believes in UFOs. He says:
Like Fox Mulder, I was the rebel, the man from the corridors of power who wouldn't play by the same 'establishment' rules as everyone else.
This blog is not concerned with aliens. I have nothing against aliens. Indeed, if our stony orb is under imminent threat of invasion, I want to be in with winning side. But this blog, and this blog-post, is concerned with the fatuous, imbecilic, snot-struck inverted commas that the author has put around the word 'establishment'.
You put quotation marks, dear reader, around quotations. Is that too bloody complicated? And if you're quoting, I want to know who you're quoting. 'Who', as Hamlet asks, 'calls me villain?' But I read that whole damned preface and there wasn't a sniff of a whiff of a citation.
Here are the 'possibilities':
A) He wants to refer to the idea of the establishment, but at the same time imply that he is too clever to believe in the idea.
B) He wants to refer to the establishment, but feels that the word itself is beneath him. His vocabulary is much better than that.
If A - if the the idea is too simplistic for him - then why the hell is he referring to it? If B - if the word is beneath him - then where's the better one?
If you are clever, be clever. If you are eloquent, be eloquent. Man cannot take a crap in inverted commas. You do, or you don't. If you have a better way of saying it, then say it better. If you have a more subtle understanding, demonstrate it. Do not send a bastard word to wander in this weary world and then deny its parentage.
Using spurious inverted commas is like telling guests that you can cook wonderfully, but you've chosen to serve them swill. It would be rude if it were true, but nobody believes you anyway.
Am I perhaps being too cruel to somebody whose aim was not linguistic felicity, but extra-terrestrial revelation? Okay. Here's the introduction to the Arden edition* of Othello:
The analysis of Shakespeare's 'characters' has become unfashionable....
Are they not characters? If they're not, and I'm prepared to believe that, what are they? If you know the secret, do bloody tell.
This introduction... cannot simply ignore 'character criticism'.
Is it not character criticism? If it's not, what is it? If you don't know the right word, stop writing until you do.
I cannot help feeling [Try harder] that such contrary impressions are meant to intimate Othello's 'otherness'...
Whose word is that? Yours? Why deny your own writing?
A comparison of two other admired Othellos prompted a 'racial' observation...
I read on (wearily), and it was racial. And here is the true fatuous, pretentious, aphasic imbecility of the whole introduction. Here is why it is unpardonable in academic writing:
Bradley and his followers located 'the real Othello' in the first half of the play....
Now I'm stuck, flummoxed and immerded. You see, this is an introduction to a Shakespeare play. It's full of quotations. But I can't tell whether the writer is quoting Bradley here, or simply resorting to his 'turd-brained', 'incoherent', 'semi-literate', 'lack-word' 'tic'.
For that which we would write about, we must find a word: of the rest we must not write.
*The Arden Second Series were the best editions of Shakespeare ever published. The Arden Third Series, or at least the ones I have read, are uniform tosh. Many of the annotations in this copy of Othello end in question marks. Some end in exclamation marks. I hang upon my altar, and I hoist my axe again.
P.S. There is a whole 'blog' devoted to unnecessary quotation marks. It can be found here.
When Americans write lists they tend to do it like this:
The Inky Fool is always floating, gloating, thinking, stinking, and winking.
Those who never felt the need to waste tea in Boston Harbo(u)r tend to write it like this:
The Inky Fool is always floating, gloating, thinking, stinking and winking.
The English do not usually insert the comma before and. However, a chap called F.H. Collins insisted that you should, and it therefore became the house style of the Oxford University Press. So it's called an Oxford Comma*. There are myriad arguments for and against the Oxford comma. People cite authority, precedent, Fowler, ambiguity, concision(,) and almost everything else. These are not my concern.
I would merely like to point out that lists with an Oxford comma seem to build to a climax. The comma sets off the final noun and gives it emphasis.
You are my PA, my friend, my lover, and my god.
The commaless list, on the other hand seems more reasonable and less exciting.
Every Tom, Dick and Harry.
I would choose my punctuation based not on some rule, but on the way in which I would like you, mysterious reader, to read the sentence.
Now watch this:
*Or, sometimes, a serial comma.
P.S. There's an immemorial superstition that if you sleep with a book under your pillow the information therein will somehow seep into your brain. I have no idea whether this can be scientifically proved, but I used to live above the Oxford University Press Bookshop.
Commas can destroy or save cities and raise (or lower) the dead. According to Luke's Gospel, the following bit of banter occurred amongst the crucified 1,977 years ago.
And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us. But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss.
And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in paradise.
OR
Verily I say unto thee today, Thou shalt be with me in paradise
The difference is rather important. You see, there are two basic Christian ways of looking at eternal life. 1) You die and your soul pops up to Heaven 2) You die. You're put in the ground. You lie there until Jesus comes again and then your body is resurrected at the last day.
That comma, is the difference. Is Jesus saying today that etc etc, or is Jesus saying that Today etc etc?
Unfortunately the Greek of the time didn't have punctuation as we would understand it and so the entire question of the nature of eternal life is lost to us, because of a lack of commas.
134 years ago this April, the Bulgarians rose up against Ottoman rule. The rebellion was put down with horrid violence. In Bulgaria's second city of Plovdiv 15,000 civilians were massacred. An order was sent by the Ottoman high command to be even nastier to the citizens of Pazardzhik. The order read "Burn the town, not spare it", which would have left 25,000 people dead, or at least homeless. However, a sympathetic clerk who understood the tactical importance of commas changed the command to "Burn the town not, spare it." and thousands of lives were therefore saved from peremptory combustion.
All of which goes to show that a well placed comma can kill, save, or explain the mystery of eternal life.
Would have been burned
P.S. Sir John Harington, top poet and inventor of the first flushing lavatory (which he wrote a poem about), sent a present to James VI of Scotland, just before he became James I of England quoting that passage from Luke: "Remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom."
I don't know if you've ever noticed the two pictures of codpieces on your computer keyboard.
Once upon a time there were Gauls who spoke Gaulish until Caesar came and cut them all into three parts. One of the Gaulish words that the Gauls used to speak was braca meaning trousers, the Gauls being far more troused than the toga-ed Romans.
Anyway, from this came the early French brague meaning trousers, and when they wanted a word for a codpiece they decided to call it a braguette or little trousers, which is not to be confused with baguette meaning stick. In fact a Frenchman might brag that his baguette was too big for his braguette, but then Frenchmen will claim anything. They're braggarts (literallyone who shows off his codpiece).
Braguettes were important back then, especially as part of a suit of armour. Henry VIII (who was rather concerned about his reproductive abilities) had armour like this:
So everyone carried on being happily Medieval and building cathedrals and that sort of thing. And then people started wondering what to call the big structural supports in these big supported structures. There was (I imagine) an emergency meeting of builders and linguists and they decided that these new-fangled architectural supports looked like nothing so much as big stone codpieces.
Compare, contrast, and try not to think about the dog.
Anyway, in the 1570s they decided to call them braggets. However, a fellow called Captain John Smith sailed to America, shagged a native girl called Pocahontas, came back to England, and wrote a dictionary. (Back then men were men and lexicographers diddled princesses.) More precisely, he wrote a book called A Sea-Man's Grammar and Dictionary. Captain Smith didn't call it a bragget. He called it a bracket, and the name and spelling stuck.
"I'm sorry, Pocahontas, but I've got to go back to England and write a nautical dictionary."
So now you've got an architectural thing called a bracket. But if you want to be really secure, you should use a double bracket. A double bracket looks like this:
So what are you going to call this ] bit of punctuation?
That, my child, is correct. You're going to call it a bracket, because it looks like something that looks like a codpiece. My etymological dictionary says that this happened in 1750, but I just found a usage from 1711 in William Whiston's racy classic Primitive Christianity Revived.
This earlier citation makes me a clever, clever, clever little boy.
I used to have a teacher who apostrophised everything. That's not to say that he talked to inanimate objects, at least to not to my knowledge. It was not the rhetorical apostrophisation, turning from the audience to address a city or a table or somesuch (London, can you wait?). No, it was turning away part of a word and replacing it with an apostrophe. He wrote a lot of notices that would refer to the 'phone and the 'papers, the punctuation point standing in for the missing tele and news. The habit was at the same time wondrously fastidious and gloriously silly. It would be fun to continue it to its logical conclusion: lunch' as a shortening of luncheon, fo'rt'night as a shortening of fourteen nights and 'bus as shortening for the macaronicvoiture omnibus introduced by Monsieur Laffitte to the weary streets of Paris in 1820.
Technically, if you did consider 'bus to be an abbreviation, the plural would be bus as well as omnibus is simply the dative plural of the Latin omnus, meaning everybody. It was a car for everybody. So it wouldn't pluralize to bi as it was already plural.
Mind you, I used to know a jentacular chap who insisted that porridge was a plural as it was a shortening of porridge oats. So "How are your porridge?" "My porridge are delicious, thank you."
Speaking of macaronic buses:
WHAT is this that roareth thus? Can it be a Motor Bus? Yes, the smell and hideous hum Indicat Motorem Bum! Implet in the Corn and High Terror me Motoris Bi: Bo Motori clamitabo Ne Motore caedar a Bo-- Dative be or Ablative So thou only let us live: Whither shall thy victims flee? Spare us, spare us, Motor Be! Thus I sang; and still and still anigh Came in hordes Motores Bi, Et complebat omne forum Copia Motorum Borum. How shall wretches live like us Cincti Bis Motoribus? Domine, defende nos Contra hos Motores Bos!
- A.D. Godley 1914
That was terribly funny if you know a little Latin. If you don't and it wasn't, then I shall tell you what I used to tell my teacher: that I'm terribly sorry and will do better Next Time. Though I never did.
Next Time used to be such an important idea: a gleaming and better othertime, like an old man's memories.
This morning I saw a headline squashed into a side-column:
BODY OF JOURNALIST
KILLED BY BOMB
IS FLOWN HOME
The problem was that I was reading it line by line (as I had to). So when I had finished line two but not started line three, the thing had a strangely metaphysical feel to it.
Years ago I used to proof read (appropriately, no two dictionaries can agree on whether proof read is one word, two words or hyphenated) TV listings: the little programme summaries towards the back of the newspaper. I learned so many wonderful things back then. I learned that outtake is one word, that EastEnders has a capital E in the middle and that people read sentences from the beginning to the end. The reason for that last one was that each episode of a soap opera would have two main plot strands, so the descriptions I proofed would look like this:
Ben ends up in bed with Tyra and Wayne loses his job
The problem with this sentence is that the reader is likely to read it from beginning to end. This means that half way through the sentence the reader has:
Ben ends up in bed with Tyra and Wayne
"Wow!" thinks the reader. "A threesome!" But then he finds the orphaned words:
loses his job
A verb and object cut loose from their mooring and left to drift incompletely on the seas of grammar. The reader is puzzled for a moment. He feels lost. He feels betrayed. He feels as Helen Keller would if you chucked her out of an airplane. Then, in a flash, he realises his mistake. He puts his finger back at the beginning of the sentence and starts again:
Ben ends up in bed with Tyra [pause] and Wayne loses his job.
So one of my main jobs was to put a comma before the word and. This was not because there was any grammatical necessity. The conjunction and between two main clauses is usually unpunctuated. It was merely a readerly necessity because readers move from the beginning of the sentence to the end interpreting all the time.
In this we are quite different from the Germans and Romans and anyone else with a very inflected language. In Latin you have to read the whole sentence and then make a guess as to its meaning. This is because the word order is so loose that a main verb or restrictive modifier can be skulking at the end of a sentence. What that patient waiting for the full stop does to the whole nature of the German mind I quiver to think and it is, anyway, beyond the mandate of this blog.
English is ambiguous and the reader impatient for meaning. Of course this allows for one our simplest forms of humour, the twist at the end of the sentence, as in "I don't go to church in the nude... much."
All of this is terribly acute if there's a line or page break to halt the reader, but I suppose that both are pretty perilous anyway. There was a glorious Mail article about how the
amputee model Heather Mills married Beatles leg- end Paul McCartney
And page breaks allowed my favourite joke in Hancock's Half Hour where a policeman on the witness stand is reading testimony from his notebook. He concludes:
I apprehended the suspect and took him into custard.
He then licks the tip of his finger, turns the page of his notebook and adds:
I told you that there would be another post on Thomas Browne'sReligio Medici. It has been slow in coming but I read at the speed of a retarded six-year-old. This from page 55:
All flesh is grass, is not only metaphorically, but literally, true ; for all those creatures we behold are but the herbs of the field, digested into flesh in them, or more remotely carnified in our selves.
Is it me, or does the word carnified somehow suggest employment in a travelling circus? Of course it means turned into meat, as in carnivorous or the carnal embrace discussed in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia.
THOMASINA: Septimus, what is carnal embrace?
SEPTIMUS: Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one’s arms around a side of beef.
THOMASINA: Is that all?
SEPTIMUS: No......a shoulder of mutton, a haunch of venison well-hugged, an embrace of grouse....caro, carnis; feminine; flesh.
THOMASINA: Is it a sin?
SEPTIMUS: Not necessarily, my lady, but when carnal embrace is sinful it is a sin of the flesh, QED.
Also in the Browne, observe the early modern plague of commas.
I came. I saw. I conquered.
I came; I saw; I conquered.
I came, I saw, I conquered.
All grammatically viable, but the voices are different. Punctuation, as I have said before, is all about signalling in what voice something should be read. So here, for what it's worth, is my ha'penny's worth.
The way I reckon it the full stops make it sound as if you're marking the sentences out with your hands: perhaps banging three times on a conference table with your big hairy hands, perhaps thrusting your index finger towards your interlocutor's face on each verb. Maybe spitting slightly. It's how I would write out a Hitler speech. I think all the words would be delivered at the same pitch.
The semicolons, on the other hand, make it sound like Churchill. It's being said slowly, but with a single cadence running through it. Came would be highest pitch and conquered lowest. I think there could even be a bigger pause on the ;s than on the .s.
The commas make it sound like Bertie Wooster: a sort of devil-may-care off-the-cuffishness. 'What did I do today? Golly, Brutus, I'm not sure. Oh, that's it. I came, I saw, I conquered. That sort of thing, I suppose. Care for a drink?'
That's how I read them anyway. Many people are worried about the near extinction of the semicolon. They sit at home and weep over its absence like a doting mother whose octuplet sons have all run away to sea. The reason for ;'s apparent scarcity is, I think, not that people don't know how to use it, but that most don't want to sound like Churchill. They have no ambition, you see.
Most style guides would have you write like Hitler.
It's also worthwhile remembering that the first writer to really use the semicolon was Ben Jonson. Shakespeare and Chaucer seem to have to got by without. The ; was invented by Aldus Manutius, who also invented italics.
I once went to the town of Westward Ho! in Devon, which is a bleak and barren place: boarded-up amusement arcades behind a tempest-beaten promenade. However, it's the only place in Britain with an exclamation mark in the name. This is because the town was built from scratch in 1865 as a resort that would feed off the popularity of Charles Kingsley's novel Westward Ho!. The town was a marketing tie-in.
Kingsley's novel derived its name from the renaissance play Westward Ho! by Thomas Webster and John Dekker about a group of people who take a trip up the Thames to Brentford. The title came from the Thames boatmen who were going upstream who would shout "Westward Ho!"
So Westward Ho! being in the West of England is pretty much a coincidence.
There's also a town in Canada that is called Saint-Louis-du-Ha!-Ha!, but nobody seems to know why.
Exclamation marks are so rare in formal writing that many of the style guides simply ignore them like the drunk at a wedding reception. The Economist and Gowers' Plain Words fall into this camp (if you can fall into a camp) while The Times and The Guardian limit themselves to the three words: "nearly always unnecessary" and "do not use".
Fowler starts by arguing that !s must be used for exclamatory statements such as What a pity! or How dull! and wishes proper such as May the force be with you! This does not work for a normal reader. Alec Guinness did not speak with an exclamation mark in his voice and the main purpose of punctuation is to denote what voice the sentence should be read in. Indeed, this is not simply a purpose but an inevitable outcome of punctuation. Fowler vaguely concedes this point but then reels off a list of varied emotions and varied voices. To be fair to Fowler, punctuation and voice change more with fashion than most matters verbal, so I shall leave him be.
Instead, I shall go with Bryson who says that exclamation marks should be used to display "strong emotion or urgency" and nothing else. They mean that the voice should be raised. Eureka! The roadsigns that say STOP! are correct. The swooning women who cry "Oh God!" are correct. The Fun Facts columns that say "A cheetah can run at 75mph!" are wrong, unless you go around shouting at people about cheetahs, which I confess I sometimes do.
The crime against humanity, though, is the exclamation mark used to designate a joke. I took the main road out of town, but the police made me put it back!!! is a capital offence and if you ever do it I will hunt you down like a dog (I hunt dogs) and then do foul things to your corpse.
Worst, though, is an exclamation mark used to indicate a joke that isn't a joke. This is a variation of the person who exclaims, "I'm always losing my car keys,' and then laughs as though they had said something funny. Such people look at me hoping that I will laugh too, but I do not. I do not. I return their glance with a still, acidic gaze and reach for my set of recreational scalpels.
If this is replicated in print I get properly angry. I once received a wedding invitation that said that you could drive to the ceremony "if you can find a place to park!!!!!"
Five exclamation marks.
And then, when the church was set ablaze during the service with the doors locked from the outside, the police had the temerity to call my crime "motiveless".
Almost everybody knows that it is wrong to use apostrophes before an ‘s’ which denotes a plural rather than a possessive. So it is “breakfasts” and “tomatoes”, not “breakfast’s” (which I saw on a sign yesterday) or “tomato’s”.
But what about plurals of words made up of initial letters, like “GCSE” or “CEO”? (Incidentally, these should – strictly speaking – be referred to as initialisms, rather than acronyms – see explanation below)*. Does the same rule still apply?
I think it does, but perhaps not so strongly. A reference to “CD’s” or “MP’s” may not stand out so clearly as being wrong as “tomato’s”, but the apostrophe is still unnecessary – the lower case “s” is on its own enough to denote the plural. The Economist’s online style guide, in its section on acronyms, recommends using a regular lower-case “s”, with no apostrophe in sight. The same – and hereThe Economist is explicit – holds true for decades, so it is “the 1990s”, not “the 1990’s”.
Things get a little more complicated when it comes to plurals of single letters. Here the authorities do not agree. The Times style guide advises that “an apostrophe should be used to indicate the plural of single letters - p's and q's”**. This is presumably to avoid confusion with two-letter words (or initialisms) ending in "s", like "ps", "as" or "is",
But, although a recent Sunday Times feature followed this format, a Times column earlier this month referred to “Ps and Qs”. A similar discrepancy can be found between a recent article from the Daily Mail (“Ps and Qs”) and one from its sister paper, the Mail on Sunday (“p’s and q’s”). This suggests that with plurals of single letters, either format will do – upper case letters with no apostrophe, or lower case letters with an apostrophe.
* An acronym is made up of initials, or first syllables, of other words, and is pronounced as if it were a word – like NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) or Unicef (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund). With an initialism like CD, MP, GCSE or CEO, each of the initials is pronounced separately.
** The etymology of this phrase, which means “to be careful or particular in one's words or behaviour; to mind one's manners”, is mysterious; The Phrase Finder discusses it at some length. Some people think it stems from advice to apprentice typesetters or children learning to write (not muddling up two similar-looking letters), but it has also been suggested that it comes from “pints and quarts” or “pleases and thank-yous”.
I picked up a flier today for the Storytellers' Club. It advertises:
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