Eats, Shoots & Leaves (11 page)

Unsurprisingly, Gertrude Stein was not a fan of the question mark. Are you beginning to suspect – as I am – that there was something wrong at home? Anyway, 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 but anybody who can read at all knows when a question is a question [. . .] I never could bring myself to use a question mark, I always found it positively revolting, and now very few do use it.

Since Stein wrote these remarks in 1935, it’s interesting that she thought the question mark was on the way out, even then. Those of us brought up with the question-mark ethic are actually horrified when a direct question is written without a question mark – as in, for example, the film title
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
. Unmarked questions left dangling in this way make me feel like an old-fashioned headmaster waiting for a child to remember his manners. “And?” I keep wanting to say. “
And?
” “Can you spare any old records,” it still says in that
charity-shop window – only now it’s a printed sign, not a handwritten one. Every time I pass it, it drives me nuts. Meanwhile, as Kingsley Amis points out in his
The King’s English
, many people start sentences with words such as, “May I crave the hospitality of your columns” and then get so involved in a long sentence that they forget it started as a question, so finish it with a full stop.

To do so not only sends the interested reader, if there is one, back to the start to check that the fellow did at any rate start to ask a direct question, it also carries the disagreeable and perhaps truthful suggestion that the writer thinks a request from the likes of him is probably a needless politeness to the likes of the editor.

What a marvellous little aside, by the way: “if there is one”.

Of all the conventions of print that make no objective sense, the use of italics is the one that puzzles most. How
does
it work? Yet ever since italic type was invented in the 15th century, it has been customary
to mix italic with roman to lift certain words out of the surrounding context and mark them as special. None of the marks in this chapter so far has anything to do with grammar, really. They are all to do with symbolically notating the music of the spoken language: of asking the question “?” and receiving the answer “!” Italics have developed to serve certain purposes for us that we never stop to question. When was the last time you panicked in the face of italics, “Hang on, this writing’s gone all wobbly”? Instead we all know that italics are the print equivalent of underlining, and that they are used for:

We even accept the mad white-on-black convention that
when a whole sentence is in italics, you use
roman type
to emphasise a key word inside it
. Some British newspapers, notably
The Guardian
, have dropped the use of italics for titles, which as far as I
can see makes life a lot more difficult for the reader without any compensating benefits. Like the exclamation mark, however, italics should be used sparingly for the purposes of emphasis – partly because they are a confession of stylistic failure, and partly because readers glancing at a page of type might unconsciously clock the italicised bit before starting their proper work of beginning in the top left-hand corner. Martin Amis, reviewing Iris Murdoch’s novel
The Philosopher’s Pupil
in
The Observer
in 1983, complained of a narrator, “N”, who was irritating on a variety of scores, and explains what can happen to a writer who uses italics too much:

Apart from a weakness for quotation marks, “N” also has a weakness for ellipses, dashes, exclamations and italics, especially italics. Each page is corrugated by half a dozen underlinings, normally a sure sign of stylistic irresolution. A jangled, surreal (and much shorter) version of the book could be obtained by reading the italic type and omitting the roman. It would go something like this:

deep, significant, awful, horrid, sickening, absolutely disgusting, guilt, accuse, secret, conspiracy, go to the cinema, go for a long walk, an entirely different
matter, an entirely new way, become a historian, become a philosopher, never sing again, Stella, jealous, happy, cad, bloody fool, God, Christ, mad, crazy . . .

Martin Amis, collected in
The War Against Cliché
, 2001

What a rotten thing to do. But on the other hand, I feel he has saved us all the bother of reading the book now.

When Amis
fils
mentioned quotation marks as an annoyance in
The Philosopher’s Pupil
, he was not objecting to those that indicate actual quotations. Inverted commas (or speech marks, or quotes) are sometimes used by fastidious writers as a kind of linguistic rubber glove, distancing them from vulgar words or clichés they are too refined to use in the normal way. This “N” character in Iris Murdoch’s novel evidently can’t bring himself to say “keep in touch” without sealing it hygienically within inverted commas, and doubtless additionally indicating his irony with two pairs of curled fingers held up at either side of his face. In newspapers, similar
inverted commas are sometimes known as “scare quotes”, as when a headline says “BRITAIN BUYS ‘WRONG’ VACCINE”, “ROBERT MAXWELL ‘DEAD’ ”, or “DEAD MAN ‘EATEN’ IN GRUESOME CAT HORROR”. Such inverted commas (usually single, rather than double) are understood by readers to mean that there is some authority for this story, perhaps even a quotable source, but that the newspaper itself won’t yet state it as fact. Evidently there is no legal protection provided by such weaselly inverted commas: if you assert someone is ‘LYING’, it’s pretty much the same in law as saying he is lying. And we all know the dead man was definitely eaten by those gruesome cats – otherwise no one would have raised the possibility. The interesting thing is how this practice relates to the advertising of ‘PIZZAS’ in quite large supermarket chains. To those of us accustomed to newspaper headlines, ‘PIZZAS’ in inverted commas suggests these
might
be pizzas, but nobody’s promising anything, and if they turn out to be cardboard with a bit of cheese on top, you can’t say you weren’t warned.

There is a huge amount of ignorance concerning the use of quotation marks. A catalogue will
advertise that its pineapple ring slicer works just like ‘a compass’. Why? Why doesn’t it work just like a compass? There is a serious cognitive problem highlighted here, I think; a real misunderstanding of what writing is. Nigel Hall, a reader in literacy education at Manchester Metropolitan University who studies the way children learn to punctuate, told me about one small boy who peppered his work with quotation marks, regardless of whether it was reporting any speech. Why did he do that? “Because it’s all me talking,” the child explained, and I imagine it was hard to argue against such immaculate logic. It seems to me that the ‘PIZZAS’ people, who put signs in their windows – ‘NOW OPEN SUNDAYS’, ‘THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING’ – have the same problem as this little boy. If they are saying this thing, announcing it, then they feel that logically they have to present it in speech marks, because
it’s all them talking
.

Comfortable though we are with our modern usage, it has taken a long time to evolve, and will of course evolve further, so we mustn’t get complacent. Until the beginning of the 18th century, quotation marks were used in England only to call attention to
sententious remarks. Then in 1714 someone had the idea of using them to denote direct speech, and by the time of the first edition of Henry Fielding’s
Tom Jones
in 1749, inverted commas were used by printers both to contain the speech and to indicate in a general, left-hand marginal way that there was speech going on.

Here the Book dropt from her Hand, and a Shower of Tears ran down into her Bosom. In this Situation she had continued a Minute, when the Door opened, and in came Lord
Fellamar
.
Sophia
started from her Chair at his Entrance ; and his Lordship advancing forwards, and making a low Bow said, ‘ I am afraid, Miss
Wes-
‘
tern
, I break in upon you abruptly.’ ‘ In-
‘ deed, my Lord,’ says she, ‘ I must own
‘ myself a little surprized at this unexpect-
‘ ed Visit.’ ‘ If this Visit be unexpected,
‘ Madam,’ answered Lord
Fellamar
, ‘ my
‘ Eyes must have been very faithless Inter-
‘ preters of my Heart . . . ’

Since the 18th century we have standardised the use of quotation marks – but only up to a point. Readers are obliged to get used to the idea from an
early age that “Double or single?” is a question not applicable only to beds, tennis and cream. We see both double and single quotation marks every day, assimilate both, and try not to think about it. Having been trained to use double quotation marks for speech, however, with single quotations for quotations-within-quotations, I grieve to see the rule applied the other way round. There is a difference between saying someone is “out of sorts” (a direct quote) and ‘out of sorts’ (i.e., not feeling very well): when single quotes serve both functions, you lose this distinction. Also, with the poor apostrophe already confusing people so much, a sentence that begins with a single quote and contains an apostrophe after three or four words is quite confusing typographically, because you automatically assume the apostrophe is the closing quotation mark:

‘I was at St Thomas’ Hospital,’ she said.

There is, too, a gulf between American usage and our own, with Americans always using double quotation marks and American grammarians insisting that, if a sentence ends with a phrase in inverted
commas, all the terminal punctuation for the sentence must come tidily inside the speech marks, even when this doesn’t seem to make sense.

Sophia asked Lord Fellamar if he was “out of his senses”. (British)

Sophia asked Lord Fellamar if he was “out of his senses.” (American)

Since where and when to put other punctuation in direct speech is a real bother to some people, here are some basic rules:

When a piece of dialogue is attributed at its end, conclude it with a comma inside the inverted commas:

“You are out of your senses, Lord Fellamar,” gasped Sophia.

When the dialogue is attributed at the start, conclude with a full stop inside the inverted commas:

Lord Fellamar replied, “Love has so totally
deprived me of reason that I am scarce accountable for my actions.”

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.”

When only a fragment of speech is being quoted, put punctuation outside the inverted commas:

Sophia recognised in Lord Fellamar the “effects of frenzy”, and tried to break away.

When the quotation is a question or exclamation, the terminal marks come inside the inverted commas:

“Am I really to conceive your Lordship to be out of his senses?” cried Sophia.

“Unhand me, sir!” she demanded.

But when the question is posed by the sentence rather than by the speaker, logic demands that the
question mark goes outside the inverted commas:

Why didn’t Sophia see at once that his lordship doted on her “to the highest degree of distraction”?

Where the quoted speech is a full sentence requiring a full stop (or other terminal mark) of its own, and coincidentally comes at the end of the containing sentence, the mark inside the inverted commas serves for both:

Then fetching a deep sigh [. . .] he ran on for some minutes in a strain which would be little more pleasing to the reader than it was to the lady; and at last concluded with a declaration, “That if he was master of the world, he would lay it at her feet.”