lyonnaise potatoes, madras cloth, melba toast, mid-Atlantic, Oxford Bags (but oxford shoe), plaster of paris, Pre-Raphaelite, the Post Office (but post office services), roman type, Russian roulette, Southerner, southern hemisphere, Spanish omelette (spanish in US), transatlantic, Trans-Siberian Railway, Union Jack.
Pride and Prejudice and Punctuation
When Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813 our system of punctuation had developed to the stage where few further changes would be made.
But one patch of inconsistency lingered: the practice of not always treating question and exclamation marks as doing the job of full stops:
“And poor Mr Darcy! dear Lizzie, only consider what he must have suffered. Such a disappointment! and with the knowledge of your ill opinion too! and having to relate such a thing to his sister! It is really too distressing, I am sure you must feel it so.”
“What say you, Mary? for you are a lady of deep reflection, I know, and read great books …” “It is unaccountable! in every view it is unaccountable!”
Today, of course, question marks and exclamation marks are almost always followed by capitals.
Scree-e-e-eechh! The Full Stop.
Now we shrink from the paragraph to a minuscule dot: the full stop, stop, full point or period. Minuscule it may be but, like atoms and germs, it packs a potent power. The full stop is the most emphatic, abrupt and unambiguous of all the punctuation marks. Leave out a vital full stop and you’re really in trouble:
KING CHARLES I PRAYED HALF AN HOUR AFTER HE WAS BEHEADED.
The full stop is probably the most used mark, partly because we need it so much, and partly because virtually everyone knows how to use it. Unfortunately not everyone knows how to use it wisely.
“Punctuation,” The Times advises its journalists, “is … not a fireworks display to show off your dashes and gaspers. Remember the first rule: the best punctuation is the full stop.”
The full stop is used like a knife to cut off a sentence at the required length. The rule is that simple: where you place your stop is up to you, but as we saw in the chapter on the sentence it is generally at the point where a thought is complete. Master this principle and you can then move on to using full stops stylistically. Here’s a typical passage displaying a variety of punctuation marks; the full stop, though, is easily the most predominant:
With intense frustration, Giles grabbed the man, surprising him. ‘No you don’t!’ he yelled hoarsely. The stranger recovered, fighting back. Fiercely. Savagely. Hard breathing. Curses. Grunts. The wincing thud of fists. An alarming stream of crimson from Giles’s left eye. Pulses racing, they glared at one another, each daring the other to make a move. A car horn in the distance. Shouts.
That’s stylised prose and could be criticised for its overuse of sentence fragments rather than complete sentences. But here the heavy-handed application of the full stop is deliberate, for we can see what the writer is getting at – the brutal punch, punch, punch of a ferocious fist fight.
We can also see from that example just how important the full stop is, although there have been numerous attempts to do without it. One of the most famous examples is the Penelope chapter in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses:
‘… a quarter after what an earthly hour I suppose they’re just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office the alarm clock next door …
[until about a thousand words later]
‘… and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.’
You did notice the full stop at the very end, didn’t you? At least James Joyce decided to observe the rule that every sentence, however long, must end with a full stop or some other ending device.
Of course that’s an extreme case, with Joyce chucking out all stops to achieve the effect of a stream of consciousness outpouring. At the other end of the scale is prose that goes full stop mad, such as this excerpt from Alain Arias-Misson’s Confessions. The style was considered highly novel in the 1970s:
Fischer shot a glance at me. Listen, Fischer, I said, is there any way out of here? You are not an initiate, he said. Of course I addressed myself to him because I hoped there might be a model in his game. I watched the pieces under his eyes. Ah yes, I said, I see. How curious, I thought, as I stood up, that I hadn’t realised it until now. I didn’t know what move to make next. The next move may be death, he said. I moved my piece and walked out of the room. He was no longer outside of the game. He was of course a free agent. I knew it would be necessary to listen carefully, in this suspended atmosphere. The master player had shown me a trick or two. It was a matter of life and death.
Again, the author is using punctuation for special effect, in this case to convey something of the heart-arresting tension of a an important chess game.
From these examples you can understand why it is difficult to lay down iron-clad rules for punctuation. Both examples are, by literary standards, correct, compelling and readable, but in the hands of lesser writers the extremes of ‘over-stopping’ and ‘understopping’ are best avoided.
More important in good writing is when and where to use the full stop. Take the following two thoughts:
• The best store for sofas is Burton & Co.
• Our sofa has served us well for twenty years.
Some writers might be tempted to link the two thoughts to make a single sentence:
Our sofa has served us well for twenty years, and the best store for sofas is Burton & Co.
A problem? Yes, because although the two thoughts are related by a common subject – sofas – they really make two quite separate points, and they don’t marry at all well in a single sentence. The crudest way to deal with the problem is to express the thoughts by constructing two adjacent sentences – separated by a full stop:
Our sofa has served us well for twenty years. The best store for sofas is Burton & Co.
But this solution feels uncomfortable, doesn’t it? Although it is more logical and grammatically correct, we are left to ponder over the relationship between Burton & Co’s sofa store and our serviceable 20-year old sofa. Where on earth is the connection? Was the sofa originally purchased from Burton & Co? If so, why not use this fact to link the two thoughts:
Our sofa has served us well for twenty years. It was supplied by Burton & Co, the best store for sofas.
Or, dispensing with the full stop:
The sofa that’s served us well for twenty years was supplied by Burton & Co, the best store for sofas.
Fine, but what if the sofa had been purchased elsewhere? If this were the case, the presentation of the facts requires a different construction entirely. Perhaps something like this:
Although our sofa didn’t come from Burton & Co, the best store for sofas, it has served us well for twenty years.