Lynne Truss. Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Gotham, New York, 2006

The initial letter of a sentence was first capitalized in the 13th century, but the rule was not consistently applied until the 16th. In manuscripts of the 4th to 7th centuries, the first letter of the page was decorated, regardless of whether it was the start of a sentence… 22-23

More than any other mark, the comma draws our attention to the mixed origin of modern punctuation, and its consequent mingling of two quite distinct functions: 1) To illuminate the grammar of a sentence 2) To point up—rather in the manner of musical notation—such literary qualities as rhythm, direction, pitch, tone and flow. 70

The earliest known punctuation—credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium (librarian at Alexandria) around 200 BC—was a three-part system of dramatic notation (involving single points at different heights on the line) advising actors when to breathe in preparation for a long bit, or a not-so-long bit, or a relatively short bit. 72

…if Hebrew or any other ancient languages had included punctuation…two thousand years of scriptural exegesis need never have occurred… 75

…Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450-1515)…Who invented the italic typeface? Aldus Manutius! Who printed the first semicolon? Aldus Manutius! The rise of printing in the 14th and 15th centuries meant that a standard system of punctuation was urgently required…facsimile examples of Aldus’s groundbreaking work include a page from Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna (1494) which features not only a very elegant roman typeface but the actual first semicolon (77)…They put colons and full stops at the ends of sentences. Like this. And also—less comfortably to the modern eye—like this:
Most significantly of all, however, they ignored the old marks that had aided the reader-aloud. Books were now for reading and understanding, not intoning. Moving your lips was becoming a no-no. within the seventy years it took Aldus Manutius the Elder to be replaced by Aldus Manutius the Younger, things changed so drastically that in 1566 Aldus Manutius the Younger was able to state that the main object of punctuation was the clarification of syntax. 78

…Gertrude Stein called the comma “servile” and refused to have anything to do with it… 80-81

[Commas before direct speech] Since this is a genuine old pause-for-breath use of the comma, however, it would be a shame to see it go. 90

Belinda opened the trap door, and after listening for a minute she closed it again. This is, actually, all right. True, it isn’t elegant, but it uses the comma grammatically as a “joining” comma, before the “and”. Most editors, however, turn purple at the sight of such a sentence. It becomes, suddenly: Belinda opened the trap door and, after listening for a minute, closed it again. It seems to me that there are two proper uses of the comma in conflict here, and that the problem arises simply from the laudable instinct in both the writer and the editor to choose just one at a time. In previous centuries…every single use of the comma would be observed: Belinda opened the trap door, and, after listening for a minute, she closed it again. 94-95

Just as there are writers who worship the semicolon, there are other high stylists who dismiss it—who label it, if you please, middle class. James Joyce preferred the colon, as more authentically classical; P.G. Wodehouse did an effortlessly marvelous job without it; George Orwell tried to avoid the semicolon completely in Coming Up for Air (1939), telling his editor in 1947, “I had decided about this time that the semicolon is an unnecessary stop and that I would write my next book without one.” Martin Amis included just one semicolon in Money (1984), and was afterwards (more than usually) pleased with himself. The American writer Donald Barthelme wrote that the semicolon is “ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly”…Gertrude Stein…They are more powerful more imposing more pretentious than a comma but they are a comma all the same. They really have within them deeply within them fundamentally within them the comma nature. Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”, 1935. 108

…Aldus Manutius…1494, it was not, as it turns out, the first time a human being ever balanced a dot on top of a comma. The medieval scribes had used a symbol very similar to our modern semicolon in the Latin transcripts to indicate abbreviations (thus “atque” might appear as “atq;”). The Greeks used the semicolon mark to indicate a question (and still do, those crazy guys). Meanwhile, a suspiciously similar mark (the punctus versus) was used by medieval scribes to indicate a termination in a psalm. 111

A classic use of the colon is as a kind fulcrum between two antithetical or oppositional statements: Man proposes: God disposes. 119

Whereas the semicolon suggests a connection between the two halves of each of these sentences, the dash ought to be preserved for occasions when the connection is a lot less direct, when it can act as a bridge between bits of fractured sense: I loved Opal Fruits—why did they call them Starbust?—reminds me of that joke… 122

The America writer Paul Robinson, in his essay “The Philosophy of Punctuation” (2002), says that “pretentious and over-active” semicolons have reached epidemic proportions in the world of academe, where they are used to gloss over imprecise thought. 124

Introduced by humanist printers in the 15th century, it was known as “the note of admiration” until the mid 17th century, and was defined—in a lavishly titled 1680 book Treatise of Stops, Points, or Pauses, and the Notes which are used in Writing and Print; Both very necessary to be well known And the Use of each to be carefully taught—in the following rhyming way: This stop denotes our Suddain Admiration,/Of what we Read, or Write, or giv Relation,/And is always cal’d an Exclamation. 137

…starting out as the punctus interrogativus in the second half of the 8th century, when it resembled a lightning flash, striking from right to left. The name “question mark” (which is rather a dull one, quite frankly) was acquired in the second half of the 19th century… 139

But when the question is indirect, the sentence manages without it: What was the point of all this sudden/interest in Brussels, he wondered. 141

…Stein said that of all punctuation marks the question mark was “the most completely uninteresting”: It is evident that if you ask a question you ask a question…I never could bring myself to use a question mark… 144

When the dialogue stands on its own, the full stop comes inside the inverted commas: “Upon my word, my Lord, I neither/understand your words nor your behaviour.” 154

Square brackets are most commonly used around the word sic (from the Latin sicut, meaning “just as”), to explain the status of an apparent mistake. Generally, sic meaning the foregoing mistake (or apparent mistake) was made by writer/speaker I am quoting; I am but the faithful messenger;…She asked for “a packet of Starbust [sic]”…However , there are distinctions within sic: it can signify two different things: 1) This isn’t a mistake, actually; it just looks like one to the casual eye…2) Tee hee, what a dreadful error! But it would be dishonest of me to correct it. 163-164

Though it is less rigorously applied than applied than it used to be, there is a rule that when a noun phrase such as “stainless-steel kitchen”. Thus you have corrugated iron, but a corrugated-iron roof. The match has a second half, but lots of second-half excitement. Tom Jones was written in the 18th century, but is an 18th-century novel. 172-173

When a hyphenated phrase is coming up, and you are qualifying it beforehand, it is necessary to write, “He was a two-or three-year-old.” 174