Eats, Shoots & Leaves (12 page)

The basic rule is straightforward and logical: when the punctuation relates to the quoted words it goes inside the inverted commas; when it relates to the sentence, it goes outside. Unless, of course, you are in America.

So far in this chapter we have looked at punctuation that encourages the reader to inflect words mentally in a straightforwardly emphatic way:

Hello!

Hello?

Hello

“Hello”

But, as many classically trained actors will tell you, it can be just as effective to lower your voice for emphasis as to raise it. Poets and writers know this too, which is where dashes and brackets come in. Both of these marks ostensibly muffle your volume and flatten your tone; but, used carefully, they can do more to make a point than any page and a half of italics. Here are some literary dashes:

He learned the arts of riding, fencing, gunnery, And how to scale a fortress – or a nunnery.

Byron,
Don Juan,
1818–20

 

Let love therefore be what it will, – my uncle Toby fell into it.

Laurence Sterne,
Tristram Shandy
, 1760–67

 

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And Immortality.

Emily Dickinson,
“Because I could not stop for Death”, 1863

The dash is nowadays seen as the enemy of grammar, partly because overtly disorganised thought is the mode of most email and (mobile phone) text communication, and the dash does an annoyingly good job in these contexts standing in for all other punctuation marks. “I saw Jim – he looked gr8 – have you seen him – what time is the thing 2morrow – C U there.” Why is the dash the mark
à la mode
? Because it is so easy to use, perhaps; and because it is hard to use wrongly; but also because it is, simply, easy to
see
. Full stops and commas are often quite tiny in modern typefaces, whereas the handsome horizontal dash is a lot harder to miss. However, just as the exclamation
mark used to be
persona non grata
on old typewriter keyboards, so you may often hunt in vain for the dash nowadays: on my own Apple keyboard I have been for years discouraged from any stream-of-consciousness writing by the belief that I had to make my own quasi-dashes from illicit double-taps on the hyphen. When I discovered a week ago that I could make a true dash by employing the alt key with the hyphen, it was truly one of the red-letter days of my life. Meanwhile, the distinction between the big bold dash and its little brother the hyphen is evidently blurring these days, and requires explanation. Whereas a dash is generally concerned to connect (or separate) phrases and sentences, the tiny tricksy hyphen (used above in such phrases as “quasi-dashes”, “double-taps” and “stream-of-consciousness”) is used quite distinctly to connect (or separate) individual words.

Are dashes intrinsically unserious? Certainly in abundance they suggest baroque and hyperactive silliness, as exemplified by the breathless Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s
Emma
:

“How do you do? How do you all do? – Quite well, I am much obliged to you. Never better. – Don’t I
hear another carriage? – Who can this be? – very likely the worthy Coles. – Upon my word, this is charming to be standing about among such friends! And such a noble fire! – I am quite roasted.”

Yet the dash need not be silly. The word has identical roots with the verb “to dash” (deriving from the Middle English verb
dasshen
, meaning “to knock, to hurl, to break”) and the point is that a single dash creates a dramatic disjunction which can be exploited for humour, for bathos, for shock. “Wait for it,” the single dash seems to whisper, with a twinkle if you’re lucky. Byron is a great master of the dramatic dash:

A little still she strove, and much repented,

And whispering “I will ne’er consent” –

consented.

A comma just wouldn’t cut the mustard there, especially with the metre hurrying you along. Meanwhile, Emily Dickinson’s extraordinary penchant for dashes has been said to be a mirror into her own synapses, symbolising “the analogical leaps and flashes of advanced cognition” – either that, of
course, or she used a typewriter from which all the other punctuation keys had been sadistically removed.

Double dashes are another matter. These are a bracketing device, and the only issue is when to use brackets, when dashes. The differences can be quite subtle, but compare these two:

He was (I still can’t believe this!) trying to climb in the window.

He was – I still can’t believe this! – trying to climb in the window.

Is one version preferable to the other? Reading both aloud, it would be hard to tell them apart. But as they sit on the page, it seems to me that the brackets half-remove the intruding aside, half-suppress it; while the dashes warmly welcome it in, with open arms.

Brackets come in various shapes, types and names:

The angle shape was the earliest to appear, but in the 16th century Erasmus gave the attractive name “lunulae” to round brackets, in reference to their moon-like profile. The word “bracket” – one of the few English punctuation words not to derive from Greek or Latin – comes from the same German root as “brace” and “breeches”, and originally referred (deep down you knew this) to the kind of bracket that holds up a bookshelf! The idea that, in writing, brackets lift up a section of a sentence, holding it a foot or two above the rest, is rather satisfying. For the reader, however, the important thing is that this lift-and-hold business doesn’t last too long, because there is a certain amount of anxiety created once a bracket has been opened that is not dissipated until it’s bloody well closed again. As Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked
so beautifully, “One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.” 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.

However, there are plenty of legitimate uses of brackets. First, to add information, to clarify, to explain, to illustrate:

Tom Jones
(1749) was considered such a lewd book that, when two earthquakes occurred in London in 1750, Fielding’s book was blamed for them.

Starburst (formerly known as Opal Fruits) are available in all corner shops.

Robert Maxwell wasn’t dead yet (he was still suing people).

Second, brackets are perfect for authorial asides of various kinds:

The exclamation mark is sometimes called (really!) a dog’s cock.

Tom Jones
was blamed for some earthquakes (isn’t that interesting?).

Square brackets are quite another thing. They are an editor’s way of clarifying the meaning of a direct quote without actually changing any of the words:

She had used it [
Tom Jones
] for quite a number of examples now.

Obviously, the text only says “it” at this point, but the editor needs to be more specific, so inserts the information inside square brackets. It is quite all right to replace the “it”, actually:

She had used [
Tom Jones
] for far too many examples by this stage.

Square brackets are most commonly used around the word
sic
(from the Latin
sicut
, meaning “just as”), to explain the status of an apparent mistake. Generally,
sic
means the foregoing mistake (or apparent
mistake) was made by the writer/speaker I am quoting; I am but the faithful messenger; in fact I never get anything wrong myself:

She asked for “a packet of Starbust [
sic
]”.

Book reviewers in particular adore to use
sic
. It makes them feel terrific, because what it means is that they’ve spotted this apparent mistake, thank you, so there is no point writing in. However, there are distinctions within
sic
: it can signify two different things:

Square brackets also (sometimes) enclose the ellipsis, when words are left out. Thus:

But a more lucky circumstance happened to poor Sophia: another noise broke forth, which almost drowned her cries [. . .] the door flew open, and in came Squire Western, with his parson, and a set of myrmidons at his heels.

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. But at least when this thesis is complete, it may tell us whether rumours are true, and that Mrs Henry Wood’s “Dead . . . and never called me mother!” (in the stage version of
East Lynne
) was really the first time it was used. Newspapers sometimes use the ellipsis interchangeably with a dash . . . which can be quite irritating . . . as its proper uses are quite specific, and very few:

Which is always a good way to end anything, of course – in an intriguing manner. When you consider the power of erotic suggestion contained in the traditional three-dot chapter ending (“He swept her into his arms. She was powerless to resist. All she knew was, she loved him . . .”), it’s a bit of a comedown for the ellipsis to be used as a sub-species of the dash. Perhaps the final word on the ellipsis should go to Peter Cook in this Pete and Dud sketch from BBC2’s
Not Only But Also
in 1966. (My memory was that the title of this show contained an ellipsis itself, being
Not Only . . . But Also
, but in modern references the ellipsis has been removed, which only goes to show you can’t rely on anything any more.) Anyway, Peter Cook’s musing on the significance of the three dots is quite as good a philosophical moment as Tom Stoppard’s critics Moon and Bird-boot in
The Real Inspector Hound
arguing about whether you can start a play with a pause. Pete is explaining to Dud how a bronzed pilot approaches a
woman on a dusty runway in Nevil Shute’s
A Town Like Alice
– a woman whose perfectly defined “busty substances” have been outlined underneath her frail poplin dress by a shower of rain and then the “tremendous rushing wind” from his propellers:

DUD
: What happened after that, Pete?

PETE
: Well, the bronzed pilot goes up to her and they walk away, and the chapter ends in three dots.

DUD
: What do those three dots mean, Pete?

PETE
: Well, in Shute’s hands, three dots can mean anything.

DUD
: How’s your father, perhaps?

PETE
: When Shute uses three dots it means, “Use your own imagination. Conjure the scene up for yourself.”
(Pause)
Whenever I see three dots I feel all funny.

One of the most profound things ever said about punctuation came in an old style guide of the Oxford University Press in New York. “If you take hyphens seriously,” it said, “you will surely go mad.” And it’s true. Just look how the little blighter escaped all previous categorisation until I had to hunt it down on its own for this teeny-weeny, hooked-on, after-thought-y chapter. It’s a funny old mark, the hyphen. Always has been. People have argued for its abolition for years: Woodrow Wilson said the hyphen was “the most un-American thing in the world” (note the hyphen required in “un-American”); Churchill said hyphens were “a blemish, to be avoided wherever possible”. Yet 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.

The name comes from the Greek, as usual. What a lot of words the Greeks had for explaining spatial relationships – for placing round, placing underneath, joining together, cutting off! Lucky for us, otherwise we would have had to call our punctuation marks names like “joiner” and “half a dash” and so on. In this case, the phrase from which we derive the name hyphen means “under one” or “into one” or “together”, so is possibly rather more sexy in its origins than we might otherwise have imagined from its utilitarian image today. Traditionally it joins together words, or words-with-prefixes, to aid understanding; it keeps certain other words neatly apart, with an identical intention. Thus the pickled-herring merchant can hold his head high, and the coat-tail doesn’t look like an unpronounceable single word. And all thanks to the humble hyphen.

The fate of the hyphen is of course implicated in a general change occurring in the language at the moment, which will be discussed in the next chapter: the astonishing and quite dangerous drift back to the
scriptio continua
of the ancient world, by which words are just hoicked together as “all one word” with no initial capitals or helpful punctuation – the only good result of which being that if books manage to survive more than the next twenty years or so, younger readers will have no trouble reading James Joyce, since unhyphenated poetic compounds like “snotgreen” and “scrotumtightening” will look perfectly everyday. Email addresses are inuring us to this trend, as are advertisements on the internet (“GENTSROLEXWATCH!”), and when I received an invitation to a BBC launch for an initiative called “soundstart”, I hardly blinked an eye. In the old days, we used to ask the following question a lot: “One word? Two words? Hyphenated?” With astonishing speed, the third alternative is just disappearing, and I have heard that people with double-barrelled names are simply unable to get the concept across these days, because so few people on the other end of a telephone know what a hyphen is.
As a consequence they receive credit cards printed with the name “Anthony Armstrong, Jones”, “Anthony Armstrong’Jones”, or even “Anthony Armstrong Hyphen”.

Where should hyphens still go, before we sink into a depressing world that writes, “Hellohowareyouwhatisthisspacebarthingforanyidea”? Well, there are many legitimate uses for the hyphen:

1. To prevent people casting aspersions at herring merchants who have never touched a drop in their lives. Many words require hyphens to avoid ambiguity: words such as “co-respondent”, “re-formed”, “re-mark”. A re-formed rock band is quite different from a reformed one. Likewise, a long-standing friend is different from a long standing one. A cross-section of the public is quite different from a cross section of the public. And one could go on. Carefully placed hyphens do not always save the day, however, as I recently had good reason to learn. Writing in
   The Daily Telegraph
   about the state of modern punctuation, I alluded to a “newspaper style-book” – carefully adding the hyphen to ensure the meaning was clear (I wasn’t sure people had heard of style books).
   And can you believe it? Two people wrote to complain! I had hyphenated wrongly, they said (with glee). Since there was no such thing as a newspaper style-book, I must really have intended “newspaper-style book”. I’ll just say here and now that I’ve rarely been more affronted. “What is a newspaper-style book, then?” I yelled. “Tell me what a newspaper-style book would look like when it’s at home!” I still have not got over this.
   

    
   

2. It is still necessary to use hyphens when spelling out numbers, such as thirty-two, forty-nine.
   

    
   

3. When linking nouns with nouns, such as the London-Brighton train; also adjectives with adjectives: American-French relations. Typesetters and publishers use a short dash, known as an en-rule, for this function.
   

    
   

4. Though it is less rigorously applied than it used to be, there is a rule that when a noun phrase such as “stainless steel” is used to qualify another noun, it is hyphenated, as “stainless-steel kitchen”. Thus you have corrugated iron, but a corrugated-iron
   roof. The match has a second half, but lots of second-half excitement.
   Tom Jones
   was written in the 18th century, but is an 18th-century novel. The train leaves at seven o’clock; it is the seven-o’clock train.
   

    
   

5. Certain prefixes traditionally require hyphens: un-American, anti-Apartheid, pro-hyphens, quasi-grammatical.
   

    
   

6. When certain words are to be spelled out, it is customary to use hyphens to indicate that you want the letters enunciated (or pictured) separately: “K-E-Y-N-S-H-A-M”.
   

    
   

7. Purely for expediency, the hyphen is used to avoid an unpleasant linguistic condition called “letter collision”. However much you might want to create compound words, there will always be some ghastly results, such as “deice” (de-ice) or “shelllike” (shell-like).
   

    
   

8. One of the main uses of the hyphen, of course, is to indicate that a word is unfinished and continues
   on the next line. Ignorance about where to split words has reached quite scary proportions, but thankfully this isn’t the place to go into it. I’ll just say that it’s “pains-]taking” and not “pain-]staking”.
   

    
   

9. Hesitation and stammering are indicated by hyphens: “I reached for the w-w-w-watering can.”
   

    
   

10. When a hyphenated phrase is coming up, and you are qualifying it beforehand, it is necessary to write, “He was a two- or three-year-old.”
    

Even bearing all these rules in mind, however, one can’t help feeling that the hyphen is for the chop. Fowler’s
Modern English Usage
as far back as 1930 was advising that, “wherever reasonable”, the hyphen should be dropped, and the 2003 edition of the
Oxford Dictionary of English
suggests that it is heading for extinction. American usage is gung-ho for compound words (or should that be gungho?), but a state of confusion reigns these days, with quite psychotic hyphenations arising in British usage, especially the rise of hyphens in phrasal verbs. “Time to top-up that pension,” the
advertisements tell us. Uneducated football writers will aver that the game “kicked-off” at 3pm, and are not, apparently, ticked off afterwards. On the
Times
books website I see that Joan Smith “rounds-up” the latest crime fiction. But what if a writer wants his hyphens and can make a case for them? Nicholson Baker in his book
The Size of Thoughts
writes about his own deliberations when a well-intentioned copy-editor deleted about two hundred “innocent tinkertoy hyphens” in the manuscript of one of his books. American copy-editing, he says, has fallen into a state of “demoralised confusion” over hyphenated and unhyphenated compounds. On this occasion he wrote “stet hyphen” (let the hyphen stand) so many times in the margin that, in the end, he abbreviated it to “SH”.

I stetted myself sick over the new manuscript. I stetted
re-enter
(rather than
reenter
),
post-doc
(rather than
postdoc
),
foot-pedal
(rather than
foot pedal
),
second-hand
(rather than
secondhand
),
twist-tie
(rather than
twist tie
), and
pleasure-nubbins
(rather than
pleasure nubbins
).

It is probably better not to inquire what
“pleasure-nubbins” refers to here, incidentally, while still defending Baker’s right to hyphenate his pleasure-nubbins – yes, even all day, if he wants to.

In the end, hyphen usage is just a big bloody mess and is likely to get messier. When you consider that fifty years ago it was correct to hyphenate Oxford Street as “Oxford-street”, or “tomorrow” as “to-morrow”, you can’t help feeling that prayer for eventual light-in-our-darkness may be the only sane course of action. Interestingly, Kingsley Amis says that those who smugly object to the hyphenation of the phrase “fine tooth-comb” are quite wrong to assert the phrase ought really to be punctuated “fine-tooth comb”. Evidently there really used to be a kind of comb called a tooth-comb, and you could buy it in varieties of fineness. Isn’t it a relief to know that? You learn something new every day.