First banned words: now punctuation

The New York Times reviewed this surprise best-seller: a book on punctuation.

There are many possible reasons for the tremendous success of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," a spritely volume that leads the reader through the valley of the shadow of comma splice; refers to the apostrophe as "our long-suffering little friend"; makes a rousing case for the semicolon's usefulness in, among other things, "calling a bunch of brawling commas to attention"; and describes Woodrow Wilson's inexplicable visceral hatred of the hyphen, which he called--spectacularly undermining his own argument--"the most un-American thing in the world."

It could be that the book is this year's intellectual stocking-stuffer, the perfect novelty gift for the chronically hard-to-amuse, akin to last year's "Schott's Miscellany" or, from 1996, "Longitude."

It could be that bookstore browsers have been drawn in by the book's cheerful yellow cover, with its droll illustration of a panda earnestly painting over the comma in the title, a visual reference to a panda-based joke about punctuation mishaps....

The book is dedicated to "the memory of the striking Bolshevik printers of St. Petersburg," who, Ms. Truss writes, "in 1905 demanded to be paid the same rate for punctuation marks as for letters, and thereby directly precipitated the first Russian Revolution." As for its title, it comes from a joke that begins, "A panda walks into a cafe."

The panda orders a sandwich, eats it and then fires a gun into the air. On his way out, he tosses a badly punctuated wildlife manual at the confused bartender and directs him to the entry marked "Panda."

Whereupon the bartender reads: "Panda. Large black-and-white bearlike mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

I must confess to a teen-age addiction to Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. To me, the semicolon is a reclining nude, the colon: a demanding Prussian bureaucrat. When I feel like living on the edge, I might employ the dash--although I'm quite sure I'm abusing it.

If any punctuation should be banned, I would nominate the exclamation point. It switches the imaginary narrator of any text from Kelsey Grammer....
to Gilbert Gottfried!

Another terrible abuse of punctuation is the emoticon--I think they were invented by teen-agers who read too much e.e. cummings. If you need an emoticon to know when I'm being sarcastic, then you need to find that special someone who will always hold your hand and spoon-feed you warm applesauce ;-)
Oh semicolon, oh hyphen, oh closed parenthesis--what have I done to you?

A related article is at LISNews.com | "People have gone hog-wild with colons."

Extra! Extra! I found a free link to the article.

"I hate colons," says Ms. Wineapple, a professor of modern literature and historical studies at Union College, in New York. Her second book, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1996; reprinted by Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), is not supposed to have a colon. She wrote the title without one. "Nobody can handle that," she says. So "anyone who ever talks about the book puts it on."

Over the last two decades, academic titles have become increasingly cumbersome, and it is rare to find an academic book title that is not lashed together with a subtitle and its colon. Some books even boast two subtitles, glued tenuously to the title with two colons.

"We joke about the title and the subtitle needing colonoscopies," says Anita Samen, managing editor in the book division of the University of Chicago Press. "People have gone hog-wild with colons."
...

"It could be worse. We could be publishing book titles that have semicolons in the titles," says Kate Douglas Torrey, director of the University of North Carolina Press.

"What the colon does in black tie the semicolon does in khakis," says William Germano, vice president and publishing director at Routledge. "What they have in common in most academic writing is that both tend to be markers of 'watch me do something complicated.'"

Mr. Germano, the author of Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious About Serious Books(University of Chicago Press, 2001), partly blames publishers for the overuse of the colon. "We've led authors to believe the way to make their book attractive is to start with something general or jazzy, then drop your guard and show what you really are writing about," he says.

Does anyone else see the irony in Mr. Germano's book title?

Posted by Mike Waugh at January 5, 2004 09:58 PM