If anyone reads these postings on even a casual basis, they might remember I made a recent entry about a book on punctuation, specifically the exclamation point as written by Florence Hazrat.
The book, An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark! is a thin volume, not much bigger than the latest iPhone, available in hardcover for $17.99 (£12.99) from a British distributor. As such, it takes a while to appear on these East Coast shores, but is worth the expense and the wait. As I mentioned in my earlier posting, I spend as much on a bacon burger in a pub/restaurant here in New York.
Ms. Hazrat clearly is in good hands with an agent and publisher, because the jacket design is an inventive exclamation mark carved out of the front dust jacket like a pumpkin, revealing the purple hardcover beneath it. There is a Hallmark greeting card look to the cover, almost as if you're going to get a exclamation mark to pop up at you when you open the cover. Indeed, the end papers are covered in the mark in various shapes and sizes
The publisher is Profile Books, 29 Cloth Fair, London, EC1A7JQ. What is it about London addresses? Obviously they don't have a grid system designating their streets in some sort of numerical convention. Cloth Fair? What the hell kind of address is that?
And that postal zip, if that's what it is. That helps deliver the mail? It looks more like the serial number on my printer, or a Captcha sequence looking to see if I can repeat the sequence and convince the computer I'm not a robot on an identification verification.
I love Google Earth. What does 29 Cloth Fair look like from a drone? Maybe a town house in a part of town that looks quite densely populated. Cloth Fair reminds me of the address on the BBC miniseries Silk, where the Queen's Counsel (QC) lawyers and their support staff were housed in "chambers" on Shoe Lane.
I love it. Lane. There aren't many address in all of New York that are Lanes. I can only think of two: Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan and Murray Lane in northern Queens where I used to live, adjacent to Murray Street. No matter.
I will admit to paying attention to punctuation, but I'm in first grade compared to the
knowledge that Florence Hazrat has with regard to literature and punctuation. She's
studied it! She pretty much has her Ph.D. in it. Her education is Cambridge and St. Andrews College in Scotland. She's German born of German and Iranian descent, and admits on her web pages to have started reading at three, so intent on reading that she says she's read a book in the shower, and used to be late for school because she couldn't close the cover on a Harry Potter volume.
She's so scholarly about those little marks that are so hard to insert in text messages because you have to change screens, that one shouldn't be surprised if in her bedroom she rests her head on pillows in the shape of ! and ? A secreted tattoo might also be present somewhere.
I too have always enjoyed reading, just not medieval texts. I probably started on a lifetime of reading newspapers sometime in the '50s when in Flushing, NY we got the Long Island Star Journal, a true local broadsheet that had news, sports and comics.
It was one of New York City's eight great newspapers published at the time. It was so local that nursery photos of newborns were published daily. My own photo must have appeared in 1949, but my folks didn't save the edition.
I have to say I pay attention to punctuation even though I do not study it. I will, obviously read about it. Years ago I was into the novels of Colin Dexter, the author of the great detective Morse stories that were so popular on public television here years ago.
Crusty, opera-loving, pint swilling, crossword maven Morse was a great detective series that spawned a prequel and a sequel, with his sometimes flappable sergeant Robby Lewis.
As I was reading the books I became aware that the Brits didn't use a " but rather a single downward ' stroke to enclose quotations. I also think that they may tuck the period (full stop) outside the trailing quote mark rather than inside. I'm not sure.
I remember writing to Mr. Dexter in the age before there was a chance to reach someone on Twitter. He was kind of enough to reply with a handwritten note explaining their custom. Usually I can find such souvenirs, but alas, not this time, and of course Mr. Dexter has passed away, as has the actor who played Morse, John Thaw. A handwritten note we know now is as rare as hen's teeth.
Say what you will about Twitter, it does allow communication with all sorts of people in all sorts of places. When I made my earlier
posting I researched if Ms. Hazrat had a Twitter handle. She does: @FlorenceHazrat. I provided a link to my posting and she responded, basically asking me to count the number of times the ! occurs in my blog, something I've been at since 2009, which now sports 1,768 postings with this one.
In her book, she is so thoroughly full of knowledge of the use of the ! that she can tell you how many times it has appeared in an author's total output. People like John Updike, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. (Ms. Hazrat freely admits she's in favor of the Oxford Comma, as am I). Who does something like that?
Count the ! in my postings? Is she nuts? Well, it seems Google Blogspot has kept all my postings on the Web ( I annually spend money and convert then into a bound book; my legacy). A simple FIND command yielded all the postings that contained at least one ! Ms. Hazrat has been anxious for the results, and here they are: The first column is he number of postings that contain the mark; the second column is the number of postings for that year. A more granular count I'm not willing to provide. Fuhgetaboutit!
2023 10 37
2022 29 106
2021 24 120
2020 33 137
2019 24 123
2018 24 119
2017 32 153
2016 22 129
2015 21 128
2014 11 119
2013 2 113
2012 5 108
2011 8 125
2010 17 113
2009 13 137
Totals 274 1768
Who other than a possessed scholar would be able to tell who first used a ! and in what medieval text it appeared in? The book is full of facsimile reproductions of ancient text and drawings of authors. The inventor of the ! mark is attributed to the Italian poet and scholar Iacopo Alpoleio who in the mid-fourteenth century saw a need to introduce something to signify some emphasis in text. With a magnifying glass, Ms. Hazrat has plucked out the dot with the superimposed apostrophe over it that Iacopo used in an ancient English text. Mr. Hazrat provides that snippet of text on page 25. Go ahead, find it for yourself.
The exclamation mark as we know it today was designed by somebody else in the fourteenth century. In 1399, the Florentine lawyer and politician Coluccio Salutati converted Iacopo's mark to what we use today: !
Interesting, Ms. Hazrat tells us typewriters had no ! key. That's something I didn't know. I remember my Smith-Corona typewriter from the '60s used to have a ¢ sign, but I wasn't aware of the absence of a ! sign.
When I entered the office workplace in the '60s men did not type. The secretary did. The girl sitting over there had the thankless job of deciphering your scribble into typed letters. My scribble was so shitty they asked me to print and to underscore with a double line the letters I wanted to be caps.
If an exclamation mark were required, the typists performed the gymnastic feat by typing a period, then backspacing and dropping an apostrophe over the period, like Iacopo did. (Just not with a typewriter.) Typing manuals as late as 1973 contained instructions on how to create a ! when there wasn't one on the keyboard.
IBM electric Selectrics were the typewriters I saw the typists use in the office, the typewriter with the rapidly spinning ball that skirted over the inserted page. There was no handle to force the carriage back and move the page up one space and force a line change. IBM Selectrics were easy to the touch, and reacted with little finger pressure.
Hard to believe, but there have been people down through the ages who have tried to introduce more punctuation marks! For various reasons, marks such as those below have been tried to be introduced. I would liken these to early attempts to fly before the Wright Brothers did their thing there at Kitty Hawk. These marks did not fly. It is extremely difficult, or well nigh impossible to reproduce Ms. Hazrat's examples of failed punctuation marks on a keyboard. I gave up, and instead looked for pictures of what most closely resembled what she provides on page 61. Some of them look lethal and medieval if they were sharpened at hurled at an opponent.
The psi symbol, that would have a period underneath, was meant to convey the contemptuous sound of the pronounced psi, to mean contempt, or scoffing at someone. The reversed ? was meant to convey a percontation question, a word rooted in Latin from per and contus meaning through and spear to denote a rhetorical word so penetrating it slices like a lance. The Chicago Manual of Style tells us no quotation marks are to be used for sentences of indirect discourse, or rhetorical text. The manual does insert a ? at the end of such sentences as: What do we do now?
The love point, with a period under it, composed of two apprehensive question marks was asking if love was in the air, I guess. Thank goodness for failure.
We know writers can be prickly, and so can the public. I offered the example of Russell Baker telling me in a letter that those who engage in smashing words together to create homemade portmanteaus should be shot with no questions asked.
I followed that tidbit with telling her that someone responded to the WSJ in a letter to the editor where a book review of her book appeared, that those who use exclamations marks should be disembowled. Violence on your fellow man.
Reading the book I came across an offering she made about Mark Twain who was so intent that his writing should be edited and read and printed with no punctuation changed or added to by anyone other than himself, that when a proofreader made the mistake of informing Twain that he was "improving" Twain's punctuation, Twain telegraphed orders to have the man shot without giving him a chance to pray. Do as I say, and we'll get along
Florence tells us:
Exclamation marks seemed a perfect fit for the age on sensibility which puts on refined feelings in men and women...In his Essay on Punctuation of 1785. Joseph Robertson calls the exclamation mark "'the voice of nature, when she is agitated, amazed, or transported, particularly 'seemly' for poetry where ! can append 'any kind of emotion', or even just imitate a loud voice." No shit! I agree.
I feel my own use of any punctuation follows the silent voice I hear in my head when I read what I've written. I imagine it being read out loud to an audience. Thus, I make no apologies for the use of !
In our email exchanges when I promised progress on counting the ! appearances in my writing, I shared with Ms. Hazrat three pieces I forgot I had written about punctuation:
One had to do with translating emojis into punctuation, A Dot and a Banger, https://t.co/L1i7FzaQnX Another had to do with a dairy in Maine that had a federal court ruling go against it over how language was punctuated in an payroll agreement with their truckers, The $5 Million Punctuation Mark, https://onofframp.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-5-million-dollar-punctuation-mark.html. The third was a review of sorts of Cecelia Watson's book Semicolon.
Ms. Hazrat responded with a link to one of her own postings about the Oakhurst Dairy ruling that hinged on the placement of the Oxford comma vs. a semi-colon. I was flattered that I had something in common with someone with whom I do not share any academic achievements, and with whom I am separated from by age, vast cultural differences, and even an ocean.
The book's latter chapters lean toward an analysis of how our brain reacts to the appearance of the ! We learn of the brain's reaction to seeing a ! mark, how many milliseconds and what parts of the brain are activated by viewing such a display. I had my daughter, who is a Speech Language professor read the portion of Ms. Hazrat's book. It was familiar to her, as to me, since I was once a subject in her lab reacting to flashed words while having an EEG head-dress on. (I got a participation gift card to Amazon for my volunteering.)
Inevitably, the ! gets yeoman duty in advertising and political campaigns. (Is there a difference?) We get a full-bore analysis by experts on why Trump's
MAKE
AMERICA
GREAT AGAIN!
shouldn't have worked with mixed serif and sans serif lettering.. Until of course it did. We get an analysis of why Jeb! for Jeb Bush's 2016 campaign made it look like he was a Broadway show. I agree it might have that look, but I really don't think that many people reacted to it that way, if they reacted to it at all. Jeb was just not a great candidate. Experts always know so much after the fact. Just think of the analysis of the stock market after trading closes. Everyone knows everything after the bell. It's the pathologist factor. The pathologist knows everything about the person on the slab, but too late to keep life going.
And as if we need any more proof of Ms. Hazrat's scholarly chops, her Epilogue is titled Quo Vadis, Latin of course for "where are we going?" No scholar will ever fail to reveal they know some Latin, if not all of it. I say of course because I had to look it up. I never took Latin like my boyhood friend George who went to Catholic grammar school in the '50s and '60s. I only remember Quo Vadis was a movie title.
In the epilogue of "where are we going?" Ms. Hazrat's reveals some of the punctuation marks that are being proposed so that readers can impart feeling to their out loud readings. These marks appear on page 157 and hardly look like winners. They resemble a stenographer's pad as they show off their Greg or Pittman shorthand. (Do they still teach shorthand?) Not happening.
Ms Hazrat is not a hand-wringing pessimist who thinks that world is headed for doom because people use the wrong mark, or no mark at all. Look at the problems with apostrophes, the most bedeviling of all punctuation marks. I always say, "how do you pronounce an apostrophe/" Go ahead, leave it out, or get wrong. I can figure out what you mean.
Like Auden's affirming flame, Ms Hazrat tells us: "...and while it's also true that punctuation is obstinately not going anywhere any time soon, it's anything but unobtrusive. It makes us do and feel stuff. It has punching power."
And as if to prove the "punching power" Florence tells us the word "punctuation" come from the Latin (of course) punctum, "that which has been stung...as we perforate paper with a pen with forcefully dotting the end of a sentence. Imagine now that this paper used to be animal skin in the Middle Ages. Imagine now that this skin is our skin, our eardrum, our retina, our nervous system, A well=placed exclamation mark penetrates the tender barriers of our being." Brava!
The post-Covid period has still brought us a continuation of the absence of public gatherings. In New York you used to be able to count on the first of the month giving you an ad from booksellers Barnes and Noble of the schedule of the appearances of various writers who would be discussing their latest book at a Manhattan B&N store. I attended several of these over the years. But Covid, and post-Covid seems to have kept a kibosh on these activities.
Thus, I doubt Ms. Hazrat's publisher has her penciled in for any U.S.A appearances. But you never know. She might get an invite from the Columbia School of Journalism to give a talk, I'd love to get a signed copy of my purchase.
Florence of course gets the last words in, in Arabic in her Thanks! section: Inta ya noor ayni. Go ahead, look it up. I had to. (You can also download it on iTunes.)
Is this a great book for punctuation nerds? You betcha!
