Ralph's Guide to the Little Dots and Dashes

(PUNCTUATION )

Copyright, Ralph, 2002. All rights reserved. Period.

The Period

Milke Tomahartman best describes this most terminal of punctuation marks in her epic poem Ode to a Dot with her unforgettable stanza:

                   ’Tis not the fact that nothing hereto will continue

                   That makes this mark so true,

                   More pressing is the sum

                   That nothing more thereto will come.

Though more known, and rightly so, for her grammar than her prowess with words and sounds, the renowned poetess also penned a twelve-thousand-and-six-hundred-page manuscript entitled “The Run-On Sentence.” Surely no truer supporter of the full stop has ever been known. (Surely no one questioned her capitalization of the word on in the title.)

         But back to the period. the period is used at the end of the sentence, following numbers in lists, and in many abbreviations, and some people find it a tasteful addition to a martini.

         That's pretty much it. Period.

The Comma

The comma is a lot like the period, the major difference being a little tail hanging down between what would be its legs if it had legs. This is a good metaphor, since the difference between the comma and the period is that the comma is a woos, causing only a pause and not a full stop. It’s kind of like a poodle in a world of Doberman pinschers and German shepherds.

         As editors, what we find wondrous about the comma is not the many nuances it can add to the language, or the many misreadings it can avoid; what we find most wonderful about it is this:

         It looks foolish in many sans-serif typefaces, such as helvetica, with its tail attached to a tiny square box. As a result, those editors who despise and scorn the use of such typefaces as text fonts can get some mileage out of those ridiculous little marks in the ongoing fight against publishers and designers who insist on using them.

                  Publisher: "It looks modern."

                   Editor: "It looks like something scribbled on the bathroom wall!"

To fully understand the comma, see the section on the History of the Comma, at the bottom of this page.

The Colon

A colon is a colonial farmer. It has no place in this guide.

The Semicolon

A semicolon is a colonial farmer's hired hand. See above.

The Ampersand

This is not a punctuation mark; it is a word.

The Slash

This does well in late-night B movies.

          Woman: It's dark and scary walking along this deserted road late at night.

          Knife-Bearing Killer: AAaaahhhh! Slash!

          Woman: Ouch.

The Question Mark

?

The Exclamation Point

!

The Greater-than Sign

The purpose of this punctuation mark is to perfect the grace of typists, forcing them to fully lift their left pinkie off the shift key before typing a period, when typing lettered lists.

                   A. The Democratic Party

                   B. The vegetable squash

                   C> Damn!

Brackets

Brackets are things you put around your income so that other people can talk about how high it is. This does not apply to copy editors.

Parentheses

Anything that we could say about this mark would be parenthetical, which is best handled by commas, as is evident in the previous clause, and in what we have just said, and in the previous phrase, and in that one, and in that one, and in that one . . . This could go on all night!

The Em Dash

This—I have to tell you—is a wonderful—and useful—piece of punctuation. In fact, skip learning all those other punctuation marks—this one suffices whenever you are in doubt—       This entry has been discontinued for its complete lack of taste.

OK, so it's all a little weak. But have a look at the entry below on The History ofnthe Comma.

The History of the Comma

The comma is the punctuation mark that causes the most friction between editors and subeditors, between copy editors and writers, between English teachers and students, and between whiches and thats. It is the stop that grammar handbooks and style manuals devote entire chapters to. Not to be outdone, Ralph's is devoting thousands of words to the mark, and possibly a good number of the marks themselves showing their many uses. We are, in fact, going a bit further than most authorities, beginning our exploration of this most controversial piece of punctuation, with its history.

 The History 

      Legend has it that the comma (from the Sanskrit coma, meaning ‘the partial cessation of operation of thought/the brain’), if one can believe, wholeheartedly, legend, was, in fact, invented, believe it or not, by ancient Greece’s greatest mathematician, Hestrodostrophes, in the third century b.c., during the age that historians call the Golden Age of Greek Mathematicians; it was invented, it so happens, as a means of bringing about, as effectively as possible, the partial cessation of operation of thought (he also experimented in the repetition of prepositions).

         Hestrodostrophes had a reason: This great theorizer of numbers wanted desperately to silence the Greek philosophers (oxymoron: silence a Greek philosopher), who had in recent centuries taken to hanging out in marketplaces philosophizing loudly, and in the process making it extremely difficult to concentrate and get any math done—especially considering that there were throngs of them, all disagreeing and none understanding a bit of mathematics, meaning they did not stand a chance in Hades of arriving at any sort of meaningful answer to any of their countless questions (Personally, my goldfish disturbs me when I try to balance my checkbook.)

         Philosophers: “We should not allow into our minds the conviction that argumentation has nothing sound about it. Wanna buy some cabbage?”

         No wonder none of the Greeks every discovered zero! (Of course they didn’t haven my checkbook.) Who could concentrate with all that noise going on?!

         Philosophers: “ . . . much rather we should believe it is we who are not yet sound and that we must take courage and be eager to attain soundness. How about some carrots with that?”

         And so, to gain a little quiet on Sunday afternoons in his little marketfront apartment in downtown Athens, Hestrodostrophes invented the comma. In it, you see, he, like, sought, you know, to make, and more than succeeded, a device which would, under the guise of creating, say, cohesion, completely obstruct, if you know what I mean, the flow of thought . . . paralyzing the power of reason and in the process putting a sudden and dramatic end to the Golden Age of Greek Philosophy.

         You see, the comma worked like this: It allowed one, conveniently, where one found it necessary, to, where the grammar would permit, and, occasionally, even where the grammar, would not, normally, permit, break up thoughts, splitting ideas right down the in-, often blatantly so, finitive, so that any series of thoughts and impressions, no matter how vague, no matter how disjointed, and, of course, no matter how, shall we say, irrelevant, to be expressed.

         This new, exciting punctuation mark also, happily, if a punctuation mark can be happy (beyond the people who spend too much of their time sending e-mail and chatting on computer screens :) ) allowed for a never-before-seen device: the parenthetical clause, which itself allows, basically, writers to, haphazardly, throw in any little, tiny piece of information, however minuscule, however trivial, without having to look at the grammar of the sentence, and without having to, well, go to all the trouble of breaking up what they were saying and begin a new sentence, which I do, as an example, here, and, incidentally, did I tell you about my dog Pedro?

         And most of ancient Greek thought, and certainly all comprehension, not to mention patience and attention span, ceased.

          Unfortunately, Greek mathematicians also found immediate uses for the comma—as a way to break up series of digits, for instance, or, if carved out of marble, as bookends—and the Golden Age of Greek Mathematicians ended along with the Golden Age of Greek Philosophers.

         In fact, the comma pretty much put a lid on Greek thought in general, and the ancient Hellenic civilization of Europe moved on to a new stage, one powerful though less progressive, called the Golden Age of Leading Large Greek Armies Around Conquering Foreign Lands, which required little thinking and was best run by people who could not even read and were thus immune to the effects of the mind-numbing punctuation mark.

         Later, the Romans, who were never very big on thought to begin with, were the inheritors of the comma. Since much of their knowledge and technology, and even their religion, was, like the comma, a hand-me-down from the Greeks, they were able to build a civilization despite the deadly partial stop’s effect, though one which was limited to giving them a predilection for spending much of the day in public baths (a little-known effect of the comma that is still felt today by many who work with the mark, despite the nonexistence of public paths).

         Unfortunately, a few centuries later, a Roman emperor named Constantine found that he much preferred to baths in the ancient city of Byzantium, partially because the water smelled nice and partially because the bath girls were exceedingly pretty and partially because his wife, the seven-foot empress Bertheus, made life in the city of Rome a living Hades. To facilitate a more permanent settlement there, one would give the empress Bertheus solid reason to stay in Rome, he, under the guise of administrative necessity, divided the empire in half, east and west, and he did it, tragically for civilization, with, yes, a comma:

               THE EMPEROR HEREBYIUM DECREUS THE EMPIRE TO BE EASTIUM, WESTIUS

         The insertion of the comma spelled (and punctuated) the end of Roman power. Had Constantine chosen a hyphen, the two halves would have worked together to be even better than the original whole. Had he chosen a slash, he would at least have confused his enemies. Had he chosen an exclamation point, he could have marketed the empire as a dot-com company. An ampersand, an asterisk, a pound sign, a colon, UN peace-keeping troops, anything would have been better, had he only . . .

         But he did not.

         And so, the western Roman Empire fell, and a huge cloud settled over Western Europe, ringing in nearly a millennium of despair known as the Dark Ages (dark mainly from the dust). The empire's demise was due not to the westward movement of the Hsiung-nu (Huns) and other barbarian peoples, not to corruption, not to a bad poker hand, not to greed and vanity, not to malaria, not to the insanity of the emperors—all of these excuses that historians have raised—but rather to the comma.

         (On a side note, the eastern Roman empire continued to flourish for nearly a century, owing largely to its adoption of Greek as the official language. You see, in post-Alexandrian Greece, the comma had taken on a new meaning: not a partial stop but a footnote to the effect that great meatballs and beer could be had at Hestrodostrophes’s beachfront café [the family, having failed in mathematics, went into the restaurant business, with its great ancestor’s invention given a new purpose—advertising]. And the effect on writing and on thinking in general was so uplifting that the eastern half of the empire quickly surpassed the original whole in brilliance and splendor, not to mention gait.)

The next folks to receive the comma as a hand-me-down were the medieval clergy. These people were big into letters, epistles, writs, and things like that. Writing played a huge part in their lives, as seen in the following passage.

There is nothing to stop things being named by reference to others, if the name is a relative term, as when things are said to be "in place" by reference to place, or "measured" by reference to measure. But concerning non-relative terms opinions have differed. . . .

                                              —Thomas Aquinas, from Summa Theologiae

Clearly, the effects of the comma were severe. Some historians have blamed the entire Dark Ages on it, but this is probably an exaggeration; the semicolon may also have played a part (a semi-part? a part-part?).

         Still, we can without too much doubt blame the following on the comma: the Spanish Inquisition, the Black Death, the Green Death, the Purple Death, the Great Schism, famine, the Thirty Years War, intensely high infant mortality, Chaucer, the Hundred Years War, the War of the Roses, the Orange Death, the Death with the Cute Little Blue Sparkles, feudalism, oppression, persecution, English history, the wars of religion, and, of course, casseroles.

         Finally, a group of Italian writers got together and began composing in the vernacular, which is a really cool word meaning "their own language." Which is pretty stupid because WHY WOULD SOCIETIES BE WRITING IN SOME DEAD FOREIGN LANGUAGE TO BEGIN WITH? —but this is exactly what they were doing throughout Europe, writing in extinct Latin when most of them spoke Mexican, often with a Welch accent—all the result of the comma.

         And since the words they spoke had never been put to pen, the practice of the comma, along with most other punctuation marks, was for a time forgotten, and real literature began to spring up, as did ineloquent but easy-to-use phrasal verbs like spring up.

         Unfortunately, also because the language had not previously been put to pen, most of what they wrote was largely illegible and/or unreadable.

         Then, when their literature progressed, and a few people learned to paint, these people began what many centuries later became known as the Renaissance, which is a cool Old French word meaning "the comma hath come again." But these Renaissance cats (or was it bebop where people called themselves "cats"?) quickly thought up a solution to the comma problem. They used it simply as an adornment to their texts, which was fins since most of them were publishing in a dark, scribbly type called blackletter, which itself was so illegible that a guy named Gutenberg got away with publishing illegally a non-Latin version of the Bible because the church thought it was a cookbook.

         Unfortunately, this bliss did not last. Before long, those inventive Italians invented lowercase letters and a new type called . . .  well, on my computer, it is called Centaur (they didn't have Microsoft back in those days).  The Renaissance era cats called it "La typio." And unfortunately, it had commas.

         This ended the Italian Renaissance.

         But the pen and the word had spread, spread to France and to Germany, and some long, long time later, to England.

         With it, spread the comma, a pestilence worse than the Black Death.

         In Spain, it caused the fall of civilized kingdoms, and eventually, the Spanish Armada. In France, it caused, far worse, French. Then in Germany one day, a monk named Martin nailed some sentences on a church door, and within these sentences was a force even exorcism could not fight: the comma. And the Germanies were plunged into a century and a half of bloodshed.

         In England, as everybody knows, it caused something far more vile: Shakespeare.

         And thus did the comma plague the world and civilization until the Age of Reason, which was an age where people who were really good at coming up with excuses for things got paid a lot of money to do just that.

         For example, the great Age-of-Reasonist Rene Descartes locked himself in a room and doubted away everything in existence, right down to the chair he was sitting in. When he got back up off his butt and back into a sitting position, he began to come up with excises for things, beginning with his famous adage:

                   I think, hence I am.

         It is not commonly reported in the philosophy books, but he then went on for fifty pages worth of text to experiment with and expound upon different placement of the comma:

                   I think hence, I am.

                   I, think hence, I am.

         And so what led to the Age of Reason was not really the placement of ration as a basis of understanding of the world, but rather Rene Descarte's little known work, 101 Discourses on the Placement of Commas.

.        Today, we take the comma for granted, little aware of the scourge it once represented. Ralph's Manual of Style advises copyeditors to keep this in mind the next time a writer, editor or publisher tells you not to get so caught up in a simple punctuation mark.