The Inevetible

It had to happen. The Newspaper of Record has used an emoticon in the text of a quote. They did this with complete accuracy (which no doubt is why they did it) as they were quoting, or relaying what the typed text looked like in a Tweet from John W. Dean III who was expressing a RIP sentiment about the death of his lawyer Charles N. Shaffer Jr, who just passed away at 82. (An emoticon, or emotion icon is an arrangement of punctuation marks, and sometimes numbers and letters that is meant to convey the writer's emotion, e.g. sad, happy, angry...)

The names John Dean and Carl Shaffer can only mean something to those of a certain age and as yet an undiminished mental capacity. John Dean was President Nixon's chief counsel at the time of the Watergate scandal and through an immunity deal worked out by his lawyer Carl Shaffer, gave testimony against the president which in effect checkmated Richard Nixon into resigning his presidency in 1974.

Mr. Shaffer was a deft litigator and defender. At different points in his life, aside from defending John Dean, he helped prosecute James Hoffa for jury tampering, being part of the legal team that secured a conviction. He also once defended a golfer who was accused of whacking a goose with his putter after the goose was in agony from being hit by the golfer's approach shot at the 17th hole of the Congressional Country Club in Maryland. A mercy killing was advanced by the golfing doctor as the justification for the euthanasia. The ruling in the case was not disclosed in the obituary.

Through a Twitter posting, Mr. Dean posted his comments about Mr. Shaffer's passing. The obituary text using the Tweet goes: "'We lost a good one :-(,' Mr. Dean posted on Twitter last week."

Now John Dean is 76, and might be someone you'd not expect to have a Twitter account, but there you have it. He does, and he uses it, apparently. And the sentiment comes through, in the words and the emoticon. Carl was a good, guy, a good lawyer, and I'm saddened to heard of his passing.

Thrash your hands all about at the use of the emoticon to express sadness, but it is a communicative symbol that is understood my millions. Civilizations down the road from ours will struggle to decipher the hieroglyphics we leave behind, but will be enriched when they do decipher them.

And now that the Newspaper of Record has chosen to include the emoticon in its text, we have another door opening up. Usage and placement of the comma.

Twitter, being a platform open to all with an account, is easily accessible. So, I pulled up Mr. Dean's Tweet about his attorney and friend. The complete Tweet shows up as:

RIP Charles Norman Shaffer -- my friend, my attorney. We lost a good one. :-(

Certainly Mr. Roberts, in his authoritative obituary on Mr. Shaffer, is not misquoting Mr. Dean's Tweet. But once the copy editor gets through with embedding the Tweet in the text of the obituary, we see a comma has been added inside the closing quotation marks.

So, are we to believe when we read the obituary that Mr. Dean has furthered the downturned lip a bit with a comma? It's not a drool, is it? OMG.

If he hasn't, and he doesn't appear he has, then he's being misquoted in the obituary. This I'm sure is the last thing the NYT would want to be considered guilty of. But you do see the danger of adding emoticon's to formal text: you might misquote.

Commas, and in general all punctuation marks have been bedeviling writers for centuries. For myself, I think I've gotten the upper hand on most of them, but recently I've been wondering whether the comma goes inside or outside the closing quotes. 'The Chicago Manual of Style' has left me believing that inside is correct. And, I suspect, the NYT Style Guide advises the same. Thus, the copy editor is only doing their job, and doing it well. But should it remain this way if an emoticon is the last text typed in the quote? Hmmm.

We already see books written without quotation marks. There is a solid movement to abolish the apostrophe (how do you pronounce an apostrophe anyway?), and certainly if we could be rid of commas there might be some serious misunderstandings (as Lynne Truss points out), but they would probably only be about a Panda's diet or use of firearms. The line would move much faster.

There is a soon to be released book on a woman's entire adult life spent editing text at 'The New Yorker' and her struggles to get agreements on the placement of commas.  Mary Norris's 'Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen' should no doubt ignite the debate once again over the use and placement of commas.

I distinctly remember reading a quip in the 1970s, when there was so much controversy over the shape of the table at which to hold the Paris Peace Talks in an effort to end the Vietnam War, that it was suggested that a furniture maker could be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

So, just think where we could be as a global population if we could agree on the use and placement of commas. OMG.

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