National Punctuation Day

Yesterday was National Punctuation Day, by the way. (I know: What?) I didn't post on it yesterday. Here's why:

Punctuation has a wild power to enrage people. Which is very odd, because punctuation has absolutely nothing to do with actual language. It's a weak attempt to do on the page what tone, volume, emphasis, facial expressions, and gestures do in conversation: guide the reader (listener) to a proper understanding of the meaning behind the words. It's very easy to miss the other person's meaning, but if they're standing right there it's harder (though still quite possible), and you can ask. If they aren't - especially if they've been dead for centuries, well. Devices as different as the elaborate, redundantly phrased language of law and smilies have been pressed into use to combat this problem. Punctuation is another.

Punctuation is a cohesive device, an addition to function words; it points the reader to the proper analysis of the relationship between constituents in a sentence or paragraph. (Paragraphing itself is such a device. Few people get incensed over paragraphing, though Nero Wolfe once used it to decide if a dead person had actually written something...) In the hands of a skillful writer, punctuation can make the page sing; you can read a baroque page-long sentence and understand it perfectly. In the hands of an inept one, it can make you puzzled, even lost.

Like the nails in a house, punctuation holds written prose (and poetry) together. Like those nails, extra usually doesn't help but doesn't hurt, either; no house ever fell down because it had too many nails - though ugly is a different matter. Not enough punctuation can lead to a complete loss of understanding, just as no nails makes it hard for the boards to stay up, but note my modal: can isn't will. A few fewer nails (serial comma, anyone? I like them myself, but plenty of style manuals don't) are often not missed.

So: National Punctuation Day. It's kind of an odd celebration. bradshaw of the future has an apt quote from Dennis Baron, and I'll pull out two sentences of it here:

Punctuation has always changed with fashion, location, and context, a fact of language history which angers everyone who wants the rules of writing to remain both as constant as the ten commandments, and violated a lot less frequently.

One reason for its instability is the fact that no one ever agrees what punctuation is for. Sometimes it indicates pauses, sometimes syntactic units.

I did not celebrate this day as its founders wish - they wanted us to

Read a newspaper and circle all of the punctuation errors you find (or think you find but aren’t sure) with a red pen.

Take a leisurely stroll, paying close attention to store signs with incorrectly punctuated words.

Stop in those stores to correct the owners.

If the owners are not there, leave notes.

Congratulate yourself on becoming a better written communicator. (sic)

I see they decided not to tell us to make actual corrections ourselves, whipping out our trusty Wite-Out and Sharpies. Perhaps the fate of the TEAL ($3600 fine and banishment from National Parks) was a warning. The cynical Dennis Baron thinks otherwise, noting that

a close look at the NPD website suggests that its real goal is not to get you in trouble with irascible shopkeepers but to sell latte mugs, t-shirts, greeting cards, and other punctuation-themed paraphernalia.

Still, what about all that walking around correcting people? Well, as Wishydig put it...

if it's done with the right attitude there's no harm.

But is that possible? Perhaps it's only a bad attitude that leads to such a cross-country correction crusade. And it's arrogance that imposes a correction on people who have not asked for it. And it's ignorance that leads to defacement of a landmark.

I don't think that arrogance, ignorance, and a bad attitude are what punctuation deserves. (It also doesn't deserve an organization that encourages people to buy Strunk & White, but that's a different post...)

Punctuation is a spectacular sign of that creative ability which led to writing in the first place, and it deserves joyful exuberance. I celebrate the ingenuity of people compensating for the fluidity of the spoken word in conversation with little marks on paper.

Long may the comma, period, parenthesis, dash, hyphen, colon, semicolon, and virgule guide our readers to our meaning.