Commas and hyphens

Commas and hyphens: little guys do the heavy lifting

The great Clive James has written that “punctuation is not an apparatus of elitist oppression, but a system of information, at the disposal of all.” Couldn’t agree more. Those little dots and squiggles are like motorway signage: they guide you to where you want to go. Or in this case, they guide you to expressing yourself accurately.

It’s amazing how much of a difference even the humblest punctuation marks can make. Take the comma, probably the humblest of the lot. Basically, a comma is the written equivalent of a breath pause in speech. There are no hard-and-fast rules for the deployment of commas. A lot depends on personal preference.

It is true that some people get in a terrible tizzy over the so-called Oxford comma. This is where you have a list of things, each individual item separated from the next by a comma and the last item preceded by the word “and”. Do you or don’t you put a comma before that “and”? If you do, you have used an Oxford comma. If you get worked up about this sort of thing, you need to get out more.

The comma is indispensable. Take this sentence: she stopped thinking of her father. Unpunctuated, it means that she no longer remembered her father. Now stick in a comma, as follows: she stopped, thinking of her father. You immediately have the image of a woman stopping in the street, thinking of dad.

A simple comma has not just changed the meaning of the sentence. It has inverted it. The second sentence means the opposite of the first. If the meaning you meant to express was the second one and you omitted the comma – well, you have just taken the wrong exit off that particular language motorway.

The hyphen, likewise, looks a fairly harmless little thing but it too is there for a good reason. Take this sentence: extra-marital sex is not the same as extra marital sex. The hyphenated version means that you are a naughty boy or girl; the second that you are having a nice time at home.

So what difference does that hyphen make? The hyphenated version is a compound adjective. It is two words acting as one (thus the hyphen to link them) qualifying the noun “sex”. In the non-hyphenated version, they are obviously separate words and they parse differently. Sex is still the noun; it is now qualified only by the adjective “marital”, which in its turn is qualified by “extra”, now functioning as an adverb.

There is an idea that because adjectives are words that qualify nouns and pronouns, therefore adverbs qualify verbs. That is correct, but they do a lot more besides. They can also qualify an adjective, another adverb, a phrase or even a complete sentence. Versatile are your adverbs.

The basic job of the hyphen is to link compound words, usually adjectives. The default position in style guides is that compound adjectives should be hyphenated, although this is a rule as much honoured in the breach as in the observance. Sometime the adjective is so obviously a compound that it seems pedantic and fussy to shove in the hyphen.

But there are times when it is essential. Take this sentence: Manchester United have re-signed Paul Pogba. The hyphen tells you that he used to play for them before going elsewhere and is now back in the fold. Without the little hyphen to help you along, you’d think that they had just let him go. Again, the meaning is not just changed, but inverted.

FERGAL TOBIN is a retired publisher and the proprietor of WriteProper, a one-morning workshop aimed at improving the written English of staff in businesses, trade associations, professional bodies and the public service. See www.writeproper.ie for more.

Common Confusions

It is generally a bad idea to be too prescriptive about English grammar and usage. Laying down the law, as if you were an authority on whatever point is vexing you, is most likely to flush out someone who can prove that the usage you deplore was used by Shakespeare or Milton.

English is very much a language of the streets and of the marketplace. It is governed principally by usage. This means that if enough people make the same “mistake” often enough, over time the “mistake” becomes the norm and the old usage either becomes archaic or obsolete.

So, while there are rules they are open to review. There is no Acadamie Anglaise trying, as the French try to do, to fix the language fast by adjudicating on what is and is not correct usage. That said, at any given time, there are words and usages in play which go against the grain of what is, for now at least, regarded as the correct form. Here are a few current examples.

The word “fewer” could well disappear from the language, as so many people use less when strictly speaking fewer is preferable. And yes, I’m well aware that less passes the Shakespeare-Milton test. That said, both words are still available to us, so it is best to use them as the language’s evolutionary process has decreed.

What’s the difference between less and fewer? Simple, less is what you can measure and fewer is what you can count. There is less water in a pint pot than in a quart pot; but fewer people watch Port Vale than Arsenal. It’s one of those distinctions, almost witty in its self-indulgence, which gives a sort of mild spice to the language.

Now here is a personal bee in the bonnet. Disinterested does not mean uninterested. I read a Manchester United match report some time ago that said that “Rooney looked disinterested”. No, he didn’t: he looked uninterested or bored. End of. Disinterested means that you are indeed interested in something, except that your interest is one that brings you pleasure but no reward. Most hobbies are disinterested pursuits. If you want to study Classical Greek to stretch your mind, that is a disinterested study.

A friend – an academic – told me that this is a lost cause. But I hope not, because there is no perfect synonym for disinterested in the language. I know words come and go in English and I don’t mind the ones that go as long as they leave good synonyms behind. So I’m happy to be Don Quixote on this one.

Using principle where the correct usage is principal is shameful, not least when seen – as I can attest – in posh broadsheet newspapers. (No “professional” journo should make this howler.) The principal of a school will have principles by which that school is run, or at least one hopes so. Likewise, you can have the principal of a company – the largest shareholder or chief executive – or of a professional practice. They will have principles that govern their behaviour.

English is a borrowing language, with tributaries flowing in from America, Australia, the West Indies, the sub-continent, and even a few loan words from Gaelic and Welsh. Thus the endless invitations to have a nice day (US) or else to be told no worries (Aussie soap operas, thanks a lot).

A recent shift, whose source is not clear to me, is to answer “I’m good” in response to “how are you”. What’s wrong with “I’m well”? After all, you can feel awfully well when you’ve not been good.

Apostrophes: their cause and cure

At the top end of Eyre Square in Galway stands a handsome piece of street furniture. It is the Browne Doorway, part of the frontage of a seventeenth-century house. A plaque nearby explains that “the doorway was relocated from it’s original position in Abbeygate Street…”

Aargh! Apostrophe alert! This matter of when to put the apostrophe in its and when to leave it out causes more trouble than it’s worth. The chap in Galway should have left it out. Here’s why.

Basically, apostrophes serve two functions. Like all punctuation and diacritical marks, their purpose is to clarify meaning, not to confuse or obscure it. First, an apostrophe indicates that something is missing. Look at the previous paragraph, where I wrote “more trouble than it’s worth”. What’s missing is the “i” in “is”, just as what is missing in the first word of this sentence is likewise the “i” in “is”. Spell it out: what is.

If you are writing “it is” or “what is” in these contracted forms, you need the apostrophe. If you are writing anything else at all, leave it out. That is an absolutely waterproof rule. By the by, if you are writing formal business documents, you probably should not be using contracted forms anyway, in which case you need never worry about the wretched apostrophe at all. Just never use it.

You can see where the confusion comes from, however. The second purpose of the apostrophe is to indicate possession. Thus “John’s coat”, Mary’s hat” etc. But even this usage has its remote origins in the fact that something has been omitted. In the case of John’s coat, it is a contraction of “John his coat”, which is how that thought was expressed in fifteenth-century English, as the language was assuming its modern form.

Where English grammar really bowls you a googly is that while the apostrophe sometimes indicates possession, most possessive pronouns don’t take an apostrophe. “Its” is a possessive pronoun: it indicates ownership of something. But because we associate apostrophes with possession, we tend to shove them in where they are not wanted.

It’s best to think of what is missing if you feel an apostrophe coming on, rather than of possession. If our Galway sculptor had realised that there was nothing missing in that “its” – in short, that he wasn’t writing an abbreviated version of “it is”—he would have been ok. Had he thought about it, as you should, he would have realised that it made no sense to sculpt “… from it is original position …” which is what in fact came out.

There is a case for saying that if we allowed the apostrophe in its/it’s to disappear altogether and simply use “its” for all usages, it would save a lot of tears. After all, there are lots of words that can mean different things, even opposite things. Thus “to cleave” can mean to join or to separate: we simply infer the correct meaning from the context. Such words are called auto-antonyms, but you don’t need to remember that.

It’s a seductive argument but an incomplete one because there are some cases where you can’t omit the apostrophe without mangling the meaning of what you have written, which is, after all, what you want to avoid.

Take the phrase “the manager’s assistant’s advice”. The position of the apostrophes indicates that there is one manager and one assistant. But if the manager has two assistants, then it becomes “the manager’s assistants’ advice, the plural possessive coming after the “s” rather than before.

Pesky little chap, the apostrophe, but he has his uses.

Academic Publishing

For those of you who think that all this grammar and usage stuff isn't important, well you're wrong. Language is slippery by nature -- that's we have confusions, doubles entendres, jokes, puns and cock-ups. But sooner rather than later, one of these will trip you up and you'll find yourself writing something that you didn't really mean to say. It can happen to anyone. Here's a salutary tale.

I recently bought a fairly specialist book on the Habsburg Empire. I'm interested in that kind of thing. The book was an expensive hardback -- €36 -- and published by Princeton University Press, a very good address. Or is it? The presentation of the text -- in short, the editing -- is embarrassing in places. On page 9, we are told that the French 4th republic was sheltering behind the Maginot Line. 'Scuse me, sor! I think that would be the 3rd republic: they were separated by the little spat known as World War II.

It gets a lot worse.Twice in one paragraph, the word "principle" is used where it should be "principal". We have Austrian leaders "pouring" over maps, and fortifications "cited" in strategic locations. That should be "poring" and "sited", as in situated. There's more: but I won't labour the point.

It costs about $65,000 a year to go the Princeton, most of which comprises tuition fees. Don't you think that their press -- whose prestige reflects that of the university -- could afford a competent copy editor? Or maybe they need WriteProper in New Jersey.

FERGAL TOBIN is a retired publisher and the proprietor of WriteProper, a one-morning workshop aimed at improving the written English of staff in businesses, trade associations, professional bodies and the public service. See www.writeproper.ie for more.

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