For those of a certain age, we remember Victor Borge's comedy sketch about punctuation. Whether you were a fan of his or not, that piece really is a classic. If you haven't seen it, I'm sure it's on You Tube. The premise was that verbal communication might be easier if each punctation mark had a sound. For example, people would know you were at the end of a sentence by a cluck of the tongue.
This topic came to mind because a couple of clever people have told me that now, post surgery, I am a semi-colon. After I chuckled, I realized that, come to think of it, there are punctuation mark stages of our lives. We all start off as a dash - that straight line that better defines the phrase that came before. Children somersault or curl up as a period. When we stand up straight, we are an exclamation point. Raising our arms in celebration, we are quote marks that can signal a beginning and an end to the event. People raise one arm in a salute, thereby using one quote mark to name whatever they are a part of. When we hug we are parentheses and when we sleep we may be commas. As we age and are bent over, we become a question mark, which can indicate that because we have decades of experience of living, we may have the answers to some of life's mysteries. In our coffin, we return to the dash or an exclamation mark at rest.
Over the course of my writing life some punctuation rules have changed. We no longer put two spaces in between sentences or a comma before the and in a series. For example, it used to be apples, oranges, and grapes but now the standard is people, animals and trees. As my colleagues and I worked on writing our annual reports, we edited carefully for consistency throughout, and mumbled at corporate brands that go against the rule of a comma before Inc. or the like.
The faithful companion of writing is reading, and while I worry about grammar and punctuation, as long as people are communicating I guess we'll see what evolves. While it seems that more people are writing thanks to email and social media, many elements of writing are changing. We LOL and use emojis to reflect feelings. I wonder what Victor Borge would have done with those!
Marilyn
PS: Sorry for the change in type size. Written and puslished from the hospital and having trouble with technology.
First of all, I'm delighted that you're feeling well enough to be blogging from the hospital. Great news!
ReplyDeleteLike you, I've noticed the changes in punctuation over the decades. I've always eliminated the comma before "and" in series, and my primary publisher had no trouble with that. Their new standard, however, includes that comma, so I'm having to retrain myself. I've also had to train myself not to put a comma before "too." I can deal with both of those, but what disturbs me is many publishers' seeming prohibition of semi-colons, replacing them with commas, because "it's too hard for people to read semi-colons." There are times when nothing will do except a semi-colon. Fortunately, my publisher agrees with me, so I'll step off the soapbox now.