It has come to my attention, meandering through Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, that grammar is not what it once was. Sousing and screwing his way around Paris in the thirties, Miller’s life is given shape by the punctuating force of the comma, the quiescent lull of the semi-colon - that aparatus of punctuation that halts breathing just long enough to make you wonder whether the sentence died when you weren’t looking.
As a freelance copywriter and copy editor, this frightens me somewhat. I am always missing not just semi-colons but commas. Sometimes my sentences hurtle into the abyss - the full-stops were not delivered on time, so casualties will ensue! In the age of digital correction, spell-check squats in the corner of the editor’s mind, inducing an arrestive fear of error. What if my semi-colon should be a comma, and what if that full-stop should be a colon? ‘Fragment, conider revising.’ But it’s meant to be a fragment, that’s the point. Isn’t it? Is it? F*** I don’t know any more.
If spell-check is one source of the editor’s existential angst, then another is international English. I spent the last year editing the news website for an international institution. I was the only native speaker. The writers were not (yet) expert users of English. My own writing has become as fractured as the geographical continuity of the English-speaking wor(l)d. I start a sentence and I haven’t a clue where it will end up. (It’s usually somewhere about three paragraphs down, hurled into a burial pit of subclauses). Apostrophes intrude, and I know it was not I that put them there!
Indeed, things get so bad sometimes, that it seems as if the deus ex machina of linguistic associations has put paid to discursive, progressive argument. That pause (you know, the one two paras down, three sentences in… ?) seems to tell me something more about the image with which I close than the sentence out of which the image is constructed. And all the image seems really to be, is a transsubstantiation into words of a certain aesthetic that somehow defines the topic, although probably, if you read it, it would just sound bad.
For Miller, punctuation was certainty. He wasn’t even proud that he rarely missed a semi-colon; his bread depended on it. No matter what absurdities went on in the world, for the proofreader at least, they were liquidated in punctuation: the chaos of the world’s wars, murders, disasters, stock market figures is channelled into a tidy canal, making its way through the locks of language - quotation marks, question marks, colons, semi-colons, commas, full-points, brackets (round and square), and so on.
Now though, punctuation itself has gone haywire in the face of a world it struggles to comprehend. Jiving ampersands and leaping apostrophes express the terror of a language no longer able to put the brakes on life. The water level is rising and the dams have burst. How many people do you know who know how to punctuate correctly? Not many, I’ll warrant. I’m one of the best I know, and I know that I get it wrong ALL THE TIME. Often, it doesn’t even seem like there are any rules any more, even though I know that they are lying around somewhere, probably stuffed under the bed of a teenager in Chertsey, front cover torn off and long lost, back cover dangling like an arm with a spiral fracture.
Our inability to punctuate these days is not so much the fault of falling educational standards, but the senselessness of any attempts to impose the order punctuation connotes. Impose order - what? On this? [Centuries of laughter bellow up from the bubbling intestines of Mother Earth.]
So, there's nothing to lose: Go on, put a full-stop in the middle of a sentence, interrogate your exclamation and punctuate your speech with thought.
