Omissive
punctuation practices on Twitter convince some observers the apostrophe is
superfluous, but a recent
essay in New Republic news magazine
dismissed the rumors of imminent apostrophe extinction. The author, however,
wasn’t exactly happy about the apostrophe’s endurance, cautioning only that leaving
it out will continue to “look funny” in formal writing.
Considering the absence of consensus about which to exterminate, the impulse to kill some
disliked punctuation is surprisingly strong. George Orwell thought the semicolon
unnecessary and resolved to avoid it; some writers demand
abolition of the dash; competent legal writers have opposed
hyphenation of many compound adjectives, claiming they’re unsightly and
often unnecessary; it’s been claimed that the comma was invented or perpetuated
because publishers benefit from their supposedly unnecessary consumption of
space; and I’ve condemned
the virgule.
This
false economy of punctuation types isn’t rational, since an abundance of types
for marking syntactic distinctions means greater
ease for readers. We have few punctuation types
not because of the uselessness of marking additional syntactic distinctions but
because of the difficulties of socially coordinating on a new punctuation type,
which must be commonly understood and highly practiced. Contrived punctuation
doesn’t stick: it requires too great an adoption rate before it gathers
momentum. Emoticons (like the smiley) may seem an exception, but they prove the
rule: they augment lexicon rather
than representing syntax. Lexicon accrues
more rapidly than punctuation types not only because we need many more semantic
distinctions but also because we more readily learn the meaning of new semantic
than syntactic signs. (Acquiring words is in the genes, but writing and its
punctuation are parts of culture.)
Why do some
writers wish for fewer types of punctuation? One reason is that overuse and
misuse often turn them against the whole type. I formed a prejudice against the
virgule (/) when enduring an employer who expressed any conjoined or disjoined
legal claims with a weaseling and/or.
Exposure to some bad freestyle blogging incites people against the dash, and the
irritating misuse of the apostrophe to create plurals of names could be enough to
alienate some writers.
Another source
of animus against punctuation variety is that writers often don’t understand
how punctuation helps readers. On discovering that they can understand text
without a certain punctuation type, they conclude that it’s unnecessary (the
main argument against the apostrophe in the New
Republic piece), but punctuation serves primarily to enhance cognitive
fluency, not to render text intelligible or disambiguate expressions.
Finally, pedagogy’s
emphasis on signaling literacy and competence through correct grammar and
mechanics leads some writers to view punctuation marks as occasions for error
rather than as promoters of cognitive ease. Fewer distinctions mean less embarrassment.
Using
all the available punctuation marks is part of exploiting the full
expressive power of written language. But
keep in mind what does not follow: if variety (in punctuation types) is a spice
of life, heaviness (of punctuation tokens) is a drag.
