Making a Point (17 page)

After this typographical excursus, we can now return to
It's time you went home …
This is quite unlike the first examples in this chapter, where we know exactly what the ellipsis represents – a specific chunk of quoted text or a specific series of numerals. It's more like Pinter or Christie, where we need to know about the relationship between the participants before we can decide what this sentence means, and how it would have been said aloud. All we can say with certainty is that it lacks the tone of finality we associate with the period, the interrogative tone of the question mark, or the confrontational tone of the exclamation. But what non-final means in this context is open to question. We can play a game adding imaginary continuations:

It's time you went home … you've had too much to drink
.

It's time you went home … as I've been telling you for the past half-hour
.

It's time you went home … but I do hope you'll stay the night
.

The place where ellipsis dots have proliferated is in informal Internet exchanges, where they are a convenient – some people would say a lazy – way of avoiding conventional punctuation. There's more to it than laziness, though. For on the Internet, something unexpected has happened to the period.

19

The value of nothing

It's time you went home

Ellipsis dots are a relatively modern convention. In older books their function is expressed by a long dash, which is how Lindley Murray, for example, illustrates ellipsis in his grammar. And in nineteenth-century novels and magazines, the dash is the norm. Now that both options are available, there's a potential semantic contrast of attitude, as the two previous chapters have illustrated. But what possible reason could there be for using no punctuation mark at all at the end of a sentence?

When we look at punctuation as a system, we can see an answer. Zero punctuation is a way of avoiding
any
of the meanings conveyed by other sentence-ending marks. If we don't want to suggest a finality (.), a question (?), an exclamation (!), a tentative continuation (…), or an abrupt ending (–), we can use nothing at all. But what sort of contexts would motivate a writer to do such a thing? There are two main circumstances: poetry, and the Internet.

Here's the beginning of Roger McGough's poem ‘The Care Less Cat', from his collection
That Awkward Age
(2009):

You win at the races

You lose your keys

The cat couldn't care less

Trip over your laces

And scrape your knees

The cat just couldn't care less

And so it goes on, each line a separate sentence, and fourteen stanzas in all, without a single period until the very last line. When McGough reads this poem aloud, he told me (in February 2014), ‘the line-break acts as a beat and the end of a stanza as a pause'. This makes sense. Because the graphic cues are there in the spacing, it isn't necessary for him to add further marks. On the other hand, he felt that ‘Mr Sappho' (also in the collection), ‘which is denser and features two voices, demanded the return to a more traditional style of punctuation':

‘I'm off to Lesbos with the girls.'

‘Yes, boss, shall I warm your pearls?'

We josh, as she goes upstairs to pack.

Not so much a holiday as the chance to get away

From those humdrum domestic chores.

And to be honest, to get away from me.

That makes sense as well. The longer the line, the stanza, and the poem, the more likely you are to punctuate, if you want your writing to be grammatically and semantically clear.

But there are also pragmatic as well as semantic reasons for punctuationless poetry. McGough comments on ‘The Care Less Cat', and also on the next poem in the collection, ‘Mr Nightingale', which adopts the same style:

My poems are usually short and I like a clean page. All too often, punctuation squiggles seem to gather like dust.

This is exactly the attitude we've seen expressed by novelists such as Cormac McCarthy (
Chapter 11
). And other poets who adopt the same strategy would doubtless agree. There
are no sentence-ending marks in T S Eliot's ‘Eyes that last I saw in tears'. There are none in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's ‘The world is a beautiful place'. Many other examples can be found in twentieth-century literature.

What is going on here? The lack of periods promotes a sense of continuity of the thought, similar to the stream-of-consciousness I've already remarked upon in James Joyce. If you want your lines and stanzas to be separate and thematically distinct from each other, yet flowing and semantically unified, this is one way you can do it. And avoiding sentence-ending marks also affects the pace of the thought – and thus the speed with which particular lines are spoken. A good example is the third stanza of Dylan Thomas's ‘The hunch-back in the park', which begins with a series of unstopped sentences:

Like the park birds he came early

Like the water he sat down

And Mister they called Hey mister

The truant boys from the town

Running when he had heard them clearly

On out of sound

The increased energy in the third line would be entirely lacking if the boys' sentences had been conventionally punctuated:

And ‘Mister', they called, ‘Hey, mister.'

Note also what happens if end punctuation is added to the opening lines:

Like the park birds he came early.

Like the water he sat down.

What the poet now presents to us is two separate events,
rather than an experience in which birds, water, arrival, and sitting are integrated into a single moment of memory. That's the annoying thing about language, from a poet's point of view: its sequential character forces you to describe a scene by starting at point A, then moving to point B, and then C. That's a plus in a conventional narrative, but if you want to present a scene holistically, it's a serious minus. So anything that can help convey the simultaneous character of your perception is going to be valuable, and not using punctuation is one of the best techniques to achieve this.

If the only instances of periodless sentences were to be found in poetry, there would be no clear explanation of the sentence
It's time you went home
, which would then simply be dismissed as an error. But sentences without end-periods are everywhere – in book-titles, newspaper headlines, road-signs, posters, product labels, advertisements, and many other locations where the period is unnecessary because the completion of the sentence is indicated by the proximity of a physical boundary. It is a modern, specifically late twentieth-century trend. In the eighteenth century, even the advertising headings in a newspaper column would be punctuated:

To be SOLD.

Advertisements.

During the nineteenth century, we see the emergence of a mixed style. One advertisement for a tooth-powder, published in about 1830, repeats the product name twice: the first time it is end-stopped:

NEWTON'S

RESTORATIVE

TOOTH POWDER.

The second time it isn't. And during the twentieth century
ads became increasingly punctuationless, with type, layout, and colour handling any required semantic contrastivity.

It's therefore not surprising to see the development of a punctuationless style in Internet settings where the physical – in this case, the electronic – boundaries suffice to mark sentence-ending. Users sense this, so that even those who would routinely use a period in other writing find themselves dropping it when engaged in a written exchange where there are pressures of space (as in texting and tweeting) or time (as in the quickfire interactions of instant messaging). Studies are few, but the general impression is that between 40 and 50 per cent of statements in short messages have no final period. The line-break has taken over the function of the period. We don't need both.

This isn't because Internet users are ignorant about punctuation, as some media pundits have suggested. On the contrary. When short messages contain more than one sentence, the first one is almost always separated from the second by some sort of mark – often by more than one, as we'll see in the next chapter. And users are stylistically aware of what they are doing. I recently had the chance to go through a corpus of text-messages produced by students in the upper years of a British secondary school (around sixteen years of age). There were hardly any sentence periods. But a corpus of essays from the same students showed a perfectly regular use of punctuation. Clearly these students were well aware of the stylistic differences between text-message and essay – and they were very ready to talk about the way punctuation varied between the two.

It isn't just a young person's thing, nor is it especially recent. An instant-message chat between my wife and my daughter in 2007 contained 123 turns, and there was only a single use of the period (after an unusually long sentence in
the conversation). There were a few exclamation marks and question marks, but otherwise the interaction looked like this:

H: i'd better do a bit of work, i suppose

H: our visitor didn't come in the end

L: me too

H: not well

L: see you later

H: great – yes in all evening

H: have a good day

L: ok, will try video

Neither party used periods, notwithstanding the age difference between them (and putting this as tactfully as I can: neither were under thirty). I have similar examples going back to the 1990s.

What I wasn't expecting, in my encounter with the young students – though, thinking about it now, I shouldn't really have been surprised – was to see a shift in the semantic values attached to the period. In a style where the default punctuation is zero, any positive marks are bound to take on new values. In traditional contexts, as we saw earlier, the period is the ‘neutral' mark, conveying the least amount of emotion. If zero becomes the neutral mark, then the role of the period will change. As Ben Crair put it, in an online report for
New Republic
(25 November 2013):

The Period Is Pissed: When did our plainest punctuation mark become so aggressive?

(For UK readers: he means ‘angry', not ‘drunk'.) The writer was reflecting his sense of what was happening in US usage, and I've encountered exactly the same thing in Britain. If a writer uses a line-break to mark the sentence end of a short
message, then using a period must convey to the reader that something semantically extra has been added. And this ‘extra' is some indication of seriousness or finality, which can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Here's one of Crair's examples:

Say you find yourself limping to the finish of a wearing workday. You text your girlfriend: ‘I know we made a reservation for your bday tonight but wouldn't it be more romantic if we ate in instead?' If she replies:

we could do that

Then you can ring up Papa John's and order something special. But if she replies,

we could do that.

Then you're either going out or you're eating Papa John's alone.

Crair sums it up:

people use the period not simply to conclude a sentence, but to announce ‘I am not happy about the sentence I just concluded.'

Crair thinks ‘This is an unlikely heel turn in linguistics', but actually it's perfectly predictable, given the systemic nature of punctuation. Change one value, and the others change too. The British students gave me several examples, such as:

A: what time do we meet

B: seven oclock [= neutral]

B: seven oclock. [= I've told you already. You should know, stupid!]

Naomi Baron and Rich Ling saw the same sort of thing going on in a 2011 study of American student text-messages. This
next comment from Natalie illustrates. If you're having an argument, she says, and the other person puts a period at the end of their sentence

It'll be like really abrupt. And you'll be like oh that sounded like they are mad.

Almost all the comments about punctuation recorded by Baron and Ling were from girls. The boys had little to say about it, other than complaining about the way girls used too many exclamation marks and emoticons. But both groups showed through their comments that they were well aware of what was going on.

Looking back over my own family instant-message exchanges, I see we do similar things. Starting a chat is easy enough. Ending it is much trickier, as we never know whether our interlocutor is going to add an extra message. The period is a useful way of saying ‘I'm finished' or ‘I'm winding up'. I've seen several conversations where there are no periods at all until the participants are about to end, as in the final exchange of this conversation between my wife and my son:

B: 11–12 tomo is a v good time to call.

H: excellent.

The zero phenomenon seems universal. Following a webinar I gave for the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) in May 2013, the chatbox received 110 reactions from teachers of English from around the world. All except three were statements, mostly one-liners adding some sort of appreciative comment, saying thank you or goodbye, or expressing agreement with what someone else had said. Over half (57) had zero punctuation, and only 7 used a final period (including one instance of > – a symbol that appears above a period on some keyboards,
and clearly a mistype). There was a single instance of a dash. The two next in frequency were the exclamation mark (30 instances) and an emoticon (9 instances), and I'll discuss these later.

What we are seeing here, then, is a stylistic shift. A new variety of English has emerged in these Internet settings, and motivated new patterns of usage, which include a realignment of some semantic values in punctuation. There are also pragmatic factors underlying the development – ergonomic factors to do with the ease and speed of typing, and fashion factors reflecting the informality, spontaneity, and playfulness associated with electronic communication. A traditional view of punctuation is not going to help in explaining what's going on electronically; nor, of course, is an account of what's happening on the Internet going to help in relation to traditional writing. From a teaching point of view, the primary aim must be to ensure that students learn – if they don't instinctively recognize it – that the two domains are stylistically distinct, that they understand the nature of the linguistic differences, and that they become ‘masters of punctuation', able to translate from one medium to the other as occasion demands.

At the same time, we mustn't overstate the differences. The Internet is a very diverse medium, with participants of all ages, social backgrounds, and temperaments, so we will find that some users punctuate their sentences in exactly the same way as they would do offline. The notions of a hierarchy and system in punctuation apply with equal force to both. And several punctuational features show little variation in usage as we move between online and offline domains, as is clear if we examine the two long-recognized options at sentence-level in the punctuation hierarchy: the exclamation mark and question mark.