On the Marks
Twenty-five recognitions on punctuation and the marks of typeset thought.
The comma was refined by Aldo Manuzio, a printer working in Venice, circa 1490. It was intended to prevent confusion by separating things. In the Greek, komma means “something cut off,” a segment.
– Mary Norris, Between You & Me, ch. 5 (on Manutius the Elder)
The comma is the named cut: what speech runs together, writing separates.
Interpvngendi rationem ad Orthographiam pertinere iudicas, Francisce Morande, ideo hanc etiam partem, hortatu impulsi tuo, elaborabimus: de qua cum eruditos homines dissentire constet, hoc ipsum argumento est, huiusce artis, ac studii scientiam non esse contemnendam. equidem usu didici, obscuras saepe sententias, si recte distinguantur, illustrari; contra, distinctionis vitio, loca multa ita perturbari, atque perverti, vix ut aliquando intelligi, aut ne intelligi quidem umquam possint.
That learned men disagree on punctuation is itself proof the discipline matters; experience teaches that correct distinction illuminates obscure sentences, while faulty distinction renders many passages scarcely intelligible – sometimes never intelligible at all.
– Aldus Manutius the Younger, Orthographiae Ratio (Venice, 1566), §Interpungendi Ratio
Faulty distinction is not absence of mark but presence of error.
Punctuation is a deeply conservative club. It hardly ever admits a new member.
Considering that we have only a handful of tools – think of them as needles and pins in a sewing kit, or drill bits and screws in a tool chest – the variety of tics that writers develop and effects that they create is astonishing.
– Mary Norris, Between You & Me, ch. 7
The toolkit is small and closed. Work with what it holds.
The bottom line is to choose one and be consistent and try not to make a moral issue out of it.
– Mary Norris, Between You & Me, ch. 5 (on the serial comma)
A rule held is a kindness; a rule moralized is a trap.
The word “hyphen” is from the Greek (which I should have known, from the hy and the ph in its spelling) and was originally an adverb meaning “together.” In form it was a curved horizontal line, set below the baseline: an open parenthesis lying on its back. It functions like the tie in music notation.
– Mary Norris, Between You & Me, ch. 6
The hyphen is a tie: it holds two notes in one gesture without making them the same note.
In “star fucker,” without the hyphen, each word has equal weight: a fucker who is a star. But in “star-fucker” the hyphen tips the weight to the first element, the object (star) of the activity embodied in the noun (fucking).
– Mary Norris glossing Russell-Shapiro, Between You & Me, ch. 6
The hyphen is direction, not connection.
For nearly five years I have devoted most of my available time to the study of English in regard to the compounding of words, and early discovered that all the rules heretofore promulgated are practically valueless, mainly because they are not based upon any real synthetic principles.
– F. Horace Teall, The Compounding of English Words (1891), preface
Rules without principle are laxity with a lineage.
For, as one word is frequently not a name, but only part of a name, so a number of words often compose one single name, and no more.
– John Stuart Mill, quoted by Teall, The Compounding of English Words (1891), ch. I
The hyphen testifies: one name has been reached.
Compounding is not a science. It should be regarded as an art, because personal preferences and individual judgments will always be decisive.
Good compounding is a manifestation of character.
The prime necessity is to safeguard against misreading.
– F. Horace Teall, Meet Mr. Hyphen (1937), via Norris, ch. 6
Compounding is character; the only error is misreading.
It was a copy editor who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick.
Allan spells “Moby-Dick” with the hyphen, as it also appears on the title page and divisional title page of the American edition; but only one of the many occurrences of the name in the text includes the hyphen. The Northwestern-Newberry editors retain the hyphen in the title, arguing that hyphenated titles were conventional in mid-nineteenth-century America. As a result, the hyphenated form refers to the book, the unhyphenated to the whale.
– Mary Norris + G. Thomas Tanselle, Between You & Me, ch. 6
One mark, placed by a nameless hand, held the book from the whale for 170 years.
“Panfree!” Lu guffawed, and said it again. “Panfree!” The copy editor was just following the rules, but Lu said she had no “word sense.”
When she retired, the folks in Heritage Village, up in Connecticut, asked whether she was interested in proofreading their newsletter. She turned them down. Apostrophes and whatnot could worry about themselves.
– Mary Norris on Lu Burke, Between You & Me
The spared mark returns the work to the word.
Eleanor once mystified me by putting a hyphen in “blue stained glass” to make it “blue-stained glass.” When I asked her about it, she took on an oracular look, and allowed that it was a difficult concept. I had the impression that I would never grasp it. Is it stained glass that is blue? Or glass that is blue-stained? The answer would seem to be: both.
– Mary Norris on Eleanor Gould, Between You & Me, ch. 6
The principled mark does not choose between readings. It holds both.
I have a friend who worked as a copy editor in Canada, and whose education in Nova Scotia was more British than American. She is very fond of the semicolon, and uses it instead of a comma in the greeting of a letter… She likes to think of the semicolon as a comma with vibrato. (She plays the viola.)
I have never liked vibrato. I like a clear sound, without a lot of throb in it. Give me a comma or a period, period. Once in a while, when it is called for, a colon.
– Mary Norris, Between You & Me, ch. 7
The semicolon is a comma with vibrato: more resonance, more throb in the line.
Where the comma is honest, the semicolon is indulgence.
The thought of apostrophes being removed made her shudder.
– Mary de Vere Taylor, via Norris, Between You & Me, ch. 8
The apostrophe can worry about itself. The ear, having served, retires.
This one instance of the word’s being withheld was more instructive than all the times the word was printed. It showed that it still had force.
– Mary Norris, Between You & Me, ch. 9
Withhold it once. That single withholding will prove it still means.
It falls to the typographer to deal with an increasing herd of flicks, squiggles, dashes, dots and ideographs that travel with the alphabet yet never quite belong. The most essential of these marks – period, comma, parentheses, and the like – are signs of logical pause and intonation, much like the rests and slurs in a musical score.
– Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, §5
The marks are not language. They are how language breathes.
A typographer will not necessarily use more analphabetic symbols per page than a typist. In fact, many good typographers use fewer. But even the most laconic typographer learns to speak this sign language with an eloquence that conventional editing software, like the typewriter, seems to preclude.
– Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, §5.1
Eloquence is in fewer marks, well placed.
The visible invisibility of the marks of punctuation, which is essential to their function, depends on these details. So, therefore, does the visible invisibility of the typeface as a whole. In the republic of typography, the lowliest, most incidental mark is also a citizen.
– Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, §5.1.2
Every mark is a citizen of the page.
When the centered dot or midpoint is made in the same way with the same tool, it becomes a small, curved wedge: a clockwise twist of the brush, with a short tail. Falling to the baseline, this tailed dot became our comma.
– Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, §5.1.1
Every mark inherits a hand.
Most hyphens currently offered are short, blunt, thick, and perfectly level, like refugees from a font of Helvetica. […] If you are tempted to redesign an existing font, using a digital font editor, the hyphen is a good character to start on. You may be able to restore instead of subvert the designer’s original intentions.
– Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, §5.1.4
Restoring the small forms honors the hands they came from.
Treat the punctuation as notation, not expression, most of the time.
– Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, §5.2.8
Treat the punctuation as notation, not expression.
Italics and small caps should not serve to emphasize a word but rather to clarify it and differentiate it from the rest.
Bold setting of partial or complete sentences, which flourishes in some newspapers, and indeed the obsession with highlighting almost half the words in a text, does not help the reader at all. He wants to comprehend, and instead he is made to feel feeble-minded.
To typeset anything and everything in one size only and not to use italic at all betrays a reprehensible lack of courtesy for the reader.
– Jan Tschichold, The Form of the Book, “Italics, Small Capitals and Quotation Marks in Books” (1964)
Over-emphasis is contempt. Differentiation is its correction.
One rarely finds a dash replacing an unexpressed thought. Usually it indicates a small break, perhaps a kind of pause for reflection. Perhaps the German name should be changed: Denkpause, thought pause, instead of Gedankenstrich, thought line.
It is often much better to see a comma in place of a dash.
The widely used em dash is a blunt line one em long. This is far too much length and invariably spoils any cultivated type area.
– Jan Tschichold, The Form of the Book, “Dashes” (1975)
The dash is for thought-pause, not thought-line; what is small enough to think, the comma carries.
Three ellipsis points only is correct. […] They tear holes into the text block if they are spaced; they should be set without any spacing. […] Ellipsis points set without spacing contribute to – and maintain – a good text block image.
– Jan Tschichold, The Form of the Book, “Ellipsis Points” (1957)
Three dots, unspaced. The block is a mark too.
Honest absences. Manutius the Elder’s own writing is not in chamber-library; the voice transmits via Norris and Margolis. Teall’s 1937 Meet Mr. Hyphen is not in chamber-library; the voice transmits via Norris ch. 6. Tschichold’s Die neue Typographie does not address the marks; the marks-Tschichold is The Form of the Book.