Eats, Shoots and Leaves

«Я постоянно нахожусь в зависимости от чего-нибудь – обычно в той сфере, где нет групп поддержки. Например, без точки с запятой я не могу продержаться дольше двух сотен слов»

A friend of mine who runs a Shakespeare reading group in New England tells a delightful story of a chap playing Duncan in Macbeth who listened with appropriate pity and concern while the wounded soldier in Act I gave his account of the battle, and then cheerfully called out, "Go get him, surgeons!" (It's supposed to be "Go, get him surgeons.")

The big final rule for the comma is one that you won't find in any books by grammarians. It is quite easy to remember, however. The rule is: don't use commas like a stupid person.

There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don't, and I'll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken.

To those who care about punctuation, a sentence such as "Thank God its Friday" (without the apostrophe) rouses feelings not only of despair but of violence. The confusion of the possessive "its" (no apostrophe) with the contractive "it's" (with apostrophe) is an unequivocal signal of illiteracy and sets off a simple Pavlovian "kill" response in the average stickler.

We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else – yet we see it all the time. No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to "get a life" by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves.

One of the best descriptions of punctuation cones in a book entitled The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist by Thomas McCormack. He says the purpose of punctuation is “to tango the reader into the pauses,inflections, continuities and connections that the spoken line would convey”

... punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop.

As we shall shortly see, the comma has so many jobs as a “separator” that it tears about on the hillside of language, endlessly organising words into sensible groups and making them stay put: sorting and dividing; circling and herding; and of course darting off with a peremptory “woof” to round up any wayward subordinate clause that makes a futile bolt for semantic freedom.

Thurber was once asked by a correspondent: “Why did you have a comma in the sentence, ‘After dinner, the men went into the 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.”

Самого важного правила в отношении запятых нет ни в одном учебнике грамматики. Однако запомнить его легко: не ставьте дурацких запятых

правильная пунктуация – это «любезность, помогающая прочесть текст без запинки».

Если эта дьявольская россыпь ненужных апострофов не исторгла из вашей груди стона и не вызвала ускоренного сердцебиения, лучше сразу закройте книгу. Вас можно поздравить – вы не педант и тем более не фанатик; вы способны счастливо жить в мире, где стандарты пунктуации стремительно рушатся.

«Почему у вас стоит запятая во фразе ‘After dinner, the men went into the living-room’?[182] » Его ответ можно назвать верхом изящества. «С помощью этой запятой, – объяснил Тёрбер, – Росс дал им время отодвинуть стулья и встать»

Чем грозит отказ от знаков препинания? Если они – стежки, то текст развалится, а пуговицы отлетят. Если рассматривать их как знаки дорожного движения, то слова врежутся друг в друга и все полетит под откос. Если вы способны хотя бы на миг вообразить, что знаки препинания – это невидимые феи, то наш бедный заброшенный язык уляжется спать без воды и подушек.

There will always be a problem about getting rid of the hyphen: if it's not extra-marital sex (with a hyphen), it is perhaps extra marital sex, which is quite a different bunch of coconuts. Phrases abound that cry out for hyphens. Those much-invoked examples of the little used car, the superfluous hair remover, the pickled herring merchant, the slow moving traffic and the two hundred odd members of the Conservative Party would all be lost without it.

I recently heard of someone studying the ellipsis (or three dots) for a PhD. And, I have to say, I was horrified. The ellipsis is the black hole of the punctuation universe, surely, into which no right-minded person would willingly be sucked, for three years, with no guarantee of a job at the end.

Writers who place whole substantive passages in brackets can't possibly appreciate the existential suffering they inflict. When a bracket opens halfway down a left-hand page and the closing bracket is, giddyingly, nowhere in sight, it's like being in a play by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Ever since it came along, grammarians have warned us to be wary of the exclamation mark, mainly because, even when we try to muffle it with brackets (!), it still shouts, flashes like neon, and jumps up and down. In the family of punctuation, where the full stop is daddy and the comma is mummy, and the semicolon quietly practises the piano with crossed hands, the exclamation mark is the big attention-deficit brother who gets overexcited and breaks things and laughs too loudly.