Making a Point (28 page)

This is all part of the aim to make students masters of punctuation (as I'll discuss further in the Appendix), by making them aware of what is going on, so that they can make an informed decision about when it is essential to use the apostrophe (if they want to avoid social criticism or get poor marks) and when it is optional. Any course of study should also make them aware of special uses of the apostrophe. A few fixed phrases require it, such as
will-o'-the-wisp
and
ne'er-do-well
, or allow it as a popular option, as in
rock 'n' roll
and
fish 'n' chips
. Distinctive pronunciations give rise to it, such as colloquial forms (
goin'
,
'cos
,
Cap'n
) or poetic variants to satisfy the metre of a line (
o'er
,
e'er
,
'gainst
). There are unique cases: the nautical pronunciation of
forecastle
resulted in
fo'c'sle
or the unique triptych
fo'c's'le
; and there is nothing else in English quite like
o'clock
. An abbreviated word prompts an apostrophe until it becomes established, as in
'flu
,
'phone
,
'bus
, and
'cello
, all common in Victorian times.
Hallow-e'en
has morphed into
Halloween
. Usage is divided over whether to use an apostrophe for years: '
06
for
2006
. Purely graphic shortenings can be seen in tables and other locations where space is at a premium, such as
Ass'n
for
Association
.

No other punctuation term has generated so much of a vocabulary as this one. The online
Urban Dictionary
provides a representative collection at
apostrophe
, which it defines as follows:

Particularly useful piece of English punctuation for making yourself look stupid. You can do this in three main ways: 1. Putting an apostrophe in when it's completely unnecessary. 2. Leaving it out when it's needed. 3. Putting it in the wrong place.

This is accompanied by entries describing various acts of misuse:
apostrophe abuse
,
apostrophe catastrophe
,
apostrophe atrocity
,
apostrophe crime
, and
apostrophe-fuck
. Associated conditions include
apostrophapathy
(‘the state of being of someone who just doesn't care about apostrophes'),
apostrophatarded
(‘unable to use apostrophes correctly'),
apostrophe paranoia
(‘condition suffered by English teachers and others who see missing and misplaced apostrophes [in places where they are actually correct]'),
apostrophobia
(‘fear of the misuse of apostrophes'),
apostrophitis
(‘the epidemic tendency to insert apostrophes where they do not belong'),
apostrophury
(‘feeling that is evoked in grammarians and other sensible people when they see apostrophes misused'), and the politically correct
apostrophically challenged
(‘the inability to make proper use of the apostrophe'). I missed
apostrophilia
(‘love of
apostrophes'), but otherwise this seems a pretty comprehensive list.
Urban Dictionary
also recommends
apostrophectomy
(‘the removal of superfluous apostrophes').

After all this, it was a relief to read about
Apostrophy
– a New Jersey rock band formed in 2005.

30

Marks of inclusion (or exclusion): round brackets

The hierarchy of levels introduced in
Chapter 14
is the organizing principle of the punctuation system. It has taken us from the most general considerations of layout and paragraphing down to the detailed level of hyphens and apostrophes. But there is one kind of punctuation that was not included in this treatment, because it operates outside the hierarchy – or, more precisely, in parallel with it. Its function, like most other marks, is to separate, but it is different from them in that it works in pairs, to show one unit being included within another. (Or, from a different perspective, to show that a unit is being excluded from the surrounding text.) There are two main types:
round brackets
(also called
parentheses
) and
quotation marks
(
Chapter 31
).

Parentheses
is an awkward term, as it refers both to the mark and to the content within the mark: parentheses contain parentheses. Printers use a shortened form:
parens
. In everyday use, the popular term is
round brackets
– in British English often shortened to
brackets
.
Curved brackets
is a less-used alternative, as is the Latin term
lunulae
(‘little moons'). Some sort of adjectival qualification is needed, though, in view of the occurrence of the other types of bracket described below, and in view of the fact that, when American English uses
brackets
on its own, the word usually refers to square brackets.

The main value of round brackets is that they allow anything to be included within anything. Here are some of the
things that can happen (all taken from earlier chapters of this book):

• a sentence within a paragraph
  

  (Spoiler alert.)
  

• a sentence within a sentence
  

  This anticipates the important role given to semantics in the twentieth century (see
  Chapter 11
  ).
  

• a clause within a sentence
  

  The extract also shows the presence of other forms of punctuation (which I'll discuss in the next chapter).
  

• a phrase within a clause
  

  the result can be ambiguity or unintelligibility (from a semantic point of view)
  

• a word within a phrase
  

  Book 3 of his (Latin) work is …
  

  Dr Johnson's
  Dictionary
  (1755) …
  

• a prefix or suffix within a word
  

  to our addressee(s)
  

Clearly, round brackets offer writers the chance to ‘say two things at once'. It would be possible to write, in the last example, ‘to our addressee or addressees', or, in the previous example, ‘Book 3 of his work, which was written in Latin …'. The brackets allow increased compactness of expression, and are thus likely to be frequent in genres (such as academic prose and poetry) where writers are articulating meaning of some complexity.

The text they contain is usually short. It's possible for a parenthetic remark to continue for more than a line, or even to contain more than one sentence, but this can make a text more difficult to process, as the reader has to keep the main sentence structure and meaning in mind while coping with the parenthetic content:

The importance of having the equipment checked by two independent companies (as recommended by the 2012 UK government report on
Services to Industry
and since confirmed by further reports in France and Canada – see the paper by Richardson in this volume) is still not always recognized.

In such cases, the ‘magic number seven' principle (
Chapter 24
) operates again. Our working memory finds it difficult to cope when put under such pressure. There's no grammatical obligation to keep the parenthetic content short, but the longer it gets, the more we may find ourselves having to read the sentence twice (at least!) to grasp its meaning.

Similarly, the use of round brackets within round brackets is something writers generally avoid. There's no problem if the nested item is a single word or date, but as soon as the content lengthens, the reader is presented with an undesirable processing load:

(as discussed by Jones (1990) in his influential essay)

(as discussed by Jones (in an influential essay first published in 1990) and other physicists)

Two levels of nesting are rare, and usually criticized as bad style:

(as discussed by Jones (in an influential essay (now available online) first published in 1990) and other physicists)

Pragmatic factors also intervene. Some people hate the look of adjacent parentheses:

(as discussed by Jones (2010))

Square brackets (see below) are sometimes used to address
this problem. They do reduce any semantic confusion, but the aesthetic considerations remain:

(as discussed by Jones [in an influential essay first published in 1990] and other physicists)

(as discussed by Jones [2010])

Round brackets are not the only kind of correlative punctuation marks. Commas and dashes can also be used in pairs, as can quotation marks, to show an included unit. As a result, we have a choice of semantic effects, which can be explored by comparing the use of the four forms in the same sentence:

The train, arriving late as usual, was full of tourists.

The train – arriving late as usual – was full of tourists.

The train (arriving late as usual) was full of tourists.

The train ‘arriving late as usual' was full of tourists.

The least obtrusive mark, and semantically the most neutral choice, is the comma: this enables a writer to remark on the train being late without any further implication. The other three choices each add something extra.

• The dashes, as already discussed in
  Chapter 17
  , suggest an informal or dramatic spontaneity that isn't present in the other options. We can readily imagine the remark being spoken in a tone of voice that would express the speaker's attitude (of irritation, frustration …).
  
• The round brackets convey no emotional content, simply suggesting that the remark is of secondary importance – an explanatory or amplificatory aside – which might be omitted without the general tenor of the passage being seriously affected. In speech, the parenthetic remark is typically less prominent – spoken with lowered pitch and reduced loudness. The punctuation is drawing the
  reader's attention to the fullness of the train, not the lateness.
  
• The quotation marks, as their name suggests, indicate that the remark is an allusion to some other text, spoken or written. The result is extra prominence: the sentence is now more about the lateness of the train than its fullness.
  

Usage has changed over the centuries. In Shakespeare's day, round brackets had a wide range of functions (including those now expressed by the dash), most of which are no longer used. We find them, for example, enclosing a term of address, an interjection, a subordinate clause, or a comment aimed at the listener (all examples from the First Folio):

We are not (Sir) nor are we like to be

But (ah) I will not, yet I loue thee well

Enter Ferdinand (bearing a log)

The one, I haue almost forgot (your pardon:)

Modern editions would either omit the brackets or replace them by commas or dashes.

Modern uses of round brackets are also anticipated in the First Folio, as when they are used to clarify the semantic structure of a passage. Look at this extract from
Two Gentlemen of Verona
(1.1.96):

I (a lost-Mutton) gaue your Letter to her (a lac'd-Mutton) and she (a lac'd-Mutton) gaue mee (a lost-Mutton) nothing for my labour.

This is much clearer than the repeated use of commas (which is how the Penguin edition of the play prints it):

I, a lost mutton, gave your letter to her, a laced mutton; and she, a laced mutton, gave me, a lost mutton, nothing for my labour.

By contrast, the Arden edition of the play keeps the brackets.

In certain circumstances, the set of correlative choices reduces to two. This happens when the item to be included is a sentence.

The train (I call it a train even though it had only one carriage) was full of tourists.

Commas are now impossible, because they are never used to end independent sentences. The conflict of functions would make for a challenging sequence:

The train, I call it a train even though it had only one carriage, was full of tourists.

Care also has to be taken when round brackets are accompanied by other punctuation marks. Here, usage has changed over the centuries. In the First Folio we see cases like ‘(your pardon:)' above, where the colon is included before the final bracket. Today, the convention is to place any following punctuation outside:

I managed to catch the train (the direct one), which meant I got to my interview on time.

I managed to catch the train (the direct one).

A common mistake in immature writing is to put the mark inside – or, if the parenthesis contains a sentence expressing a statement, to overpunctuate:

I decided to go by bus (the train was very expensive.).

It's possible to use question marks and exclamations before the final parenthesis, but this presents pragmatic problems:

I decided to go by bus (never by train!).

I decided to go by bus (will John approve?).

Two marks are necessary, because they perform different functions. But not everyone likes the look of such sequences, especially when the main sentence requires the same mark as the one within the parentheses:

I decided to go by bus (never by train!)!

Could I go by bus (is there a direct bus?)?

Formal styles of writing tend to avoid them.

Round brackets today also have a limited set of specialized functions, enabling us to succinctly identify examples, references, and cross-references, as in the citations to plays throughout this book; numbers or letters in a list, as in (
a
), (
b
), (
c
); and alternative forms of a word, as in
O
(
h
). They also, of course, have a range of technical functions, especially in mathematics and programming, and individual conventions will be encountered in reference publishing. A dictionary or index, for example, may use round brackets to identify a particular kind of information:

overcome
3.19; (~
ŵith
) 16.69

overhang
(verb) 3.18

We should also note the unusual case of an unpaired usage, when lower-case letters are used to identify items in a list:

a)

b)

c)

The need to differentiate kinds of included information led to the development, chiefly from the eighteenth century, of other kinds of bracket. Most of the modern uses are technical. Mathematics and programming, in particular, couldn't do without them. Nor could phonetics, as different kinds of bracket are used to distinguish units in speech and writing: the sound [t] in square brackets, the phoneme /t/ in slashes, the grapheme in angle brackets. But in everyday writing, brackets other than parentheses are uncommon.

• [ ]
  Square brackets
  , also called
  crotchets
  , or simply (especially in the US)
  brackets
  , are chiefly encountered when a writer wants to modify a quotation (omitting or adding content) or to make a clarification. I've used them several times in this book:
  

  omission: ‘The important point […] is that nobody is excluded.'
  

  addition: ‘[some authors] point their Matter either very loosely or not at all'
  

  gloss: ‘a shippe in Tamyse [Thames]'
  

  clarification: ‘Julie [his editor, Julius Schwarz]'
  

  expansion (here, of an abbreviation in a manuscript): ‘mo[re] correct'
  

  And I mustn't forget ‘[
  sic
  ]', a Latin word meaning ‘thus' – the conventional way of drawing attention to an authorial error or idiosyncrasy in a quotation or a piece of reported speech, as in ‘havnt [
  sic
  ]'. It's a convenient means of showing that an error is not the writer's, but is found in the original text.
  

• { } The
  brace
  was introduced in the seventeenth century
  as a way of vertically linking units (such as lines, numbers, and musical staves). The word is from French, referring to the width between the two arms. I don't use it at all in this book (apart from in this chapter), and I can't think of any reason why I should. They're typically found in technical or instructional writing to specify a limited set of options:
  

  a series of numbers: ‘{1, 3, 5, 7, 9}'
  

  a set of choices: ‘Choose an appropriate size {small, medium, large}'
  

  a combination of notes: ‘the chord {a, c, e}'
  

  In informal handwriting, it's a useful option when the writer wants to highlight a group of lines. Terminology again varies: they've been called
  curly brackets
  and
  squiggly brackets
  .
  

• < >
  Angle brackets
  or
  chevrons
  are rare in traditional writing, but are increasingly visible as a result of electronically-mediated communication, where they enclose HTML commands (such as for italics), and also act as a way of unambiguously identifying a URL or an email address without interference from any surrounding punctuation. Here's an example from earlier in this book:
  

  The website <
  www.kingsx.co.uk
  > has a big heading …
  

  Literary editors also make use of angle brackets when transcribing a manuscript that includes an illegible or lost section. Anything within these brackets is a conjecture:
  

  several of the people against the decree
  

Any of these correlative marks can be used, in pairs or singly, for artistic purposes. All have been used in electronic communication as a resource for creating emoticons. And there are even more unusual cases in poetry, where the observation that parentheses include content of secondary importance needs to be turned on its head. In a poem, what is within the parentheses is always significant – often more so than in the surrounding text.