21/09/06, Russell Smith, 'What's up Doc?' or did you mean 'What's up, Doc?'
Post
On grammar:
British writer Lynne Truss argued pretty much that the fate of Western civilization lies in the correct use of the apostrophe, and made a million bucks on the surprising welling of support for such a conservative position. She talked about commas too; the joke of her book's title, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, turns on a misplaced comma. It's easy to agree with Truss when she gives examples of the ludicrous changes of meaning that an odd piece of punctuation can effect.
But most of the debates over punctuation that take place among writers and editors -- and believe me, prickly debates they are -- are over subtler differences in usage. We argue over commas between dependent and independent clauses, commas with appositives, commas in lists, commas between adjectives, commas after conjunctions and interjections . . . there are seven densely written pages on the comma in The Chicago Manual of Style, four in Editing Canadian English. There are exceptions and variations among journals and publishers.
In other words, Truss's construction of a correct world and an incorrect world is unreal. The style manuals, and the stroppy writers who argue with their copy editors, are not arguing about what is correct and what is incorrect: They are arguing about shades of meaning and, largely, about aesthetics.
I, for example, tend to want to minimize commas, purely for aesthetic reasons. Take a sentence like: "I could get by on freelance fashion writing and whatever other form of prostitution comes my way." I would resist a comma after "writing"; some editors might automatically shove one in, after some rule they learned in a list of rules that can never be varied. Similarly, they like to put them in between adjectives when I describe, say, a big red car. It is correct to write "big, red car," yes. But it just doesn't sound as slick. Here's a better example: How does "vast Republican conspiracy" sound when corrected by an adjective-separating comma? Not quite as coherent, I think.
What is at stake here? Is this really a battle about meaning? Is it a battle, as Truss would have it, between precision and laxity, between an old world of order and politeness, in which the educated were powerful and respected, and a brash new world of proletarian rule?
Well, I'm pretty polite most of the time, so I don't think that's it.
In fact, the major style guides agree that a slow shift is taking place in punctuation practices.
Fewer commas are being used in contemporary writing. (In technical terms, there has long been a schism between "open punctuation," which uses punctuation only as necessary to prevent misinterpretation, and the more traditional "closed punctuation," which is meticulous in matching every grammatical situation with its appropriate markings. Most magazines use open punctuation now.) This, again, is just a question of modern tastes -- once again, it comes down to aesthetics. Generations raised on Hemingwayesque stylistic flair ("On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun.") are impatient with sentences hiccupping with commas. It's a modernist thing: We like our buildings and our prose streamlined.
My point is that not all changes to standard written English are mistakes, nor are they evidence of societal decline.
Some are, of course: I cringe when I read misuses of commas that lead to ambiguity or to grammatical dissonance -- for example, in the infamous "comma splice," in which a comma substitutes for a period or a conjunction ("I write about fashion, I am a prostitute"), or when completely unnecessary ("Acclaimed writer, Chantal Kreviazuk, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for journalism"). Perhaps the best example of confusion created by a missing comma that a copy editor has ever given me is the comical gulf in meaning between "What's up, Doc?" and "What's up Doc?"
But this is the troublesome question, isn't it: Why do I insist on strict grammatical convention in some cases and plead for modernity in others? Which of my bugbears is really about clarity and which is merely about clinging pedantically to some outdated and probably classist set of impenetrable conventions? And that's precisely the sort of question I hope to address in the coming weeks.
Russell Smith is the author of the novel Muriella Pent. This summer, he was the host of the CBC Radio program And Sometimes Y, which dealt with language.
British writer Lynne Truss argued pretty much that the fate of Western civilization lies in the correct use of the apostrophe, and made a million bucks on the surprising welling of support for such a conservative position. She talked about commas too; the joke of her book's title, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, turns on a misplaced comma. It's easy to agree with Truss when she gives examples of the ludicrous changes of meaning that an odd piece of punctuation can effect.
But most of the debates over punctuation that take place among writers and editors -- and believe me, prickly debates they are -- are over subtler differences in usage. We argue over commas between dependent and independent clauses, commas with appositives, commas in lists, commas between adjectives, commas after conjunctions and interjections . . . there are seven densely written pages on the comma in The Chicago Manual of Style, four in Editing Canadian English. There are exceptions and variations among journals and publishers.
In other words, Truss's construction of a correct world and an incorrect world is unreal. The style manuals, and the stroppy writers who argue with their copy editors, are not arguing about what is correct and what is incorrect: They are arguing about shades of meaning and, largely, about aesthetics.
I, for example, tend to want to minimize commas, purely for aesthetic reasons. Take a sentence like: "I could get by on freelance fashion writing and whatever other form of prostitution comes my way." I would resist a comma after "writing"; some editors might automatically shove one in, after some rule they learned in a list of rules that can never be varied. Similarly, they like to put them in between adjectives when I describe, say, a big red car. It is correct to write "big, red car," yes. But it just doesn't sound as slick. Here's a better example: How does "vast Republican conspiracy" sound when corrected by an adjective-separating comma? Not quite as coherent, I think.
What is at stake here? Is this really a battle about meaning? Is it a battle, as Truss would have it, between precision and laxity, between an old world of order and politeness, in which the educated were powerful and respected, and a brash new world of proletarian rule?
Well, I'm pretty polite most of the time, so I don't think that's it.
In fact, the major style guides agree that a slow shift is taking place in punctuation practices.
Fewer commas are being used in contemporary writing. (In technical terms, there has long been a schism between "open punctuation," which uses punctuation only as necessary to prevent misinterpretation, and the more traditional "closed punctuation," which is meticulous in matching every grammatical situation with its appropriate markings. Most magazines use open punctuation now.) This, again, is just a question of modern tastes -- once again, it comes down to aesthetics. Generations raised on Hemingwayesque stylistic flair ("On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun.") are impatient with sentences hiccupping with commas. It's a modernist thing: We like our buildings and our prose streamlined.
My point is that not all changes to standard written English are mistakes, nor are they evidence of societal decline.
Some are, of course: I cringe when I read misuses of commas that lead to ambiguity or to grammatical dissonance -- for example, in the infamous "comma splice," in which a comma substitutes for a period or a conjunction ("I write about fashion, I am a prostitute"), or when completely unnecessary ("Acclaimed writer, Chantal Kreviazuk, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for journalism"). Perhaps the best example of confusion created by a missing comma that a copy editor has ever given me is the comical gulf in meaning between "What's up, Doc?" and "What's up Doc?"
But this is the troublesome question, isn't it: Why do I insist on strict grammatical convention in some cases and plead for modernity in others? Which of my bugbears is really about clarity and which is merely about clinging pedantically to some outdated and probably classist set of impenetrable conventions? And that's precisely the sort of question I hope to address in the coming weeks.
Russell Smith is the author of the novel Muriella Pent. This summer, he was the host of the CBC Radio program And Sometimes Y, which dealt with language.
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