Why should it only be middle-class people who care about the language? I come personally from a working-class background. I went to a state school, and there are many street traders in my immediate family. Punctuation is no more a class issue than the air we breathe. It is a system of printers’ marks that has aided the clarity of the written word for the past half-millennium, and if its time has come to be replaced, let’s just use this moment to celebrate what an elegant and imaginative job it did while it had the chance. Caring about matters of language is unfortunately generally associated with small-minded people, but that doesn’t make it a small issue. The disappearance of punctuation (including word spacing, capital letters, and so on) indicates an enormous shift in our attitude to the written word, and nobody knows where it will end.
In the meantime, however, I suggest that we ponder the case of Defeatist Bookshop Woman, and consider what she must be like to live with. I may even have to write a fictional character based on her. I can see her now, holding up the queue at an ice-cream vendor, explaining her predicament: “If only one could get an ice cream from somewhere, but it’s hopeless!” Or standing outside Lincoln Center with a ticket labelled “Bolshoi” in her hand, saying, “If only I could see a ballet once in my life! But I suppose it’s not to be.”
Introduction–The Seventh Sense
Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t. A printed banner has appeared on the concourse of a petrol station near to where I live. “Come inside,” it says, “for CD’s, VIDEO’s, DVD’s, and BOOK’s.”
If this satanic sprinkling of redundant apostrophes causes no little gasp of horror or quickening of the pulse, you should probably put down this book at once. By all means congratulate yourself that you are not a pedant or even a stickler; that you are happily equipped to live in a world of plummeting punctuation standards; but just don’t bother to go any further. For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, dis-belief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.
It’s tough being a stickler for punctuation these days. One almost dare not get up in the mornings. True, one occasionally hears a marvellous punctuation-fan joke about a panda who “eats, shoots and leaves”, but in general the stickler’s exquisite sensibilities are assaulted from all sides, causing feelings of panic and isolation. A sign at a health club will announce, “I’ts party time, on Saturday 24th May we are have a disco/party night for free, it will be a ticket only evening.” Advertisements offer decorative services to “wall’s – ceiling’s – door’s ect”. Meanwhile a newspaper placard announces “FAN’S FURY AT STADIUM INQUIRY”, which sounds quite interesting until you look inside the paper and discover that the story concerns a quite large mob of fans, actually – not just the lone hopping-mad fan so promisingly indicated by the punctuation.
Everywhere one looks, there are signs of ignorance and indifference. What about that film Two Weeks Notice? Guaranteed to give sticklers a very nasty turn, that was – its posters slung along the sides of buses in letters four feet tall, with no apostrophe in sight. I remember, at the start of the Two Weeks Notice publicity campaign in the spring of 2003, emerging cheerfully from Victoria Station (was I whistling?) and stopping dead in my tracks with my fingers in my mouth. Where was the apostrophe? Surely there should be an apostrophe on that bus? If it were “one month’s notice” there would be an apostrophe (I reasoned); yes, and if it were “one week’s notice” there would be an apostrophe. Therefore “two weeks’ notice” requires an apostrophe! Buses that I should have caught (the 73; two 38s) sailed off up Buckingham Palace Road while I communed thus at length with my inner stickler, unable to move or, indeed, regain any sense of perspective.
Part of one’s despair, of course, is that the world cares nothing for the little shocks endured by the sensitive stickler. While we look in horror at a badly punctuated sign, the world carries on around us, blind to our plight. We are like the little boy in The Sixth Sense who can see dead people, except that we can see dead punctuation. Whisper it in petrified little-boy tones: dead punctuation is invisible to everyone else – yet we see it all the time. No one understands us seventh-sense people. They regard us as freaks. When we point out illiterate mistakes we are often aggressively instructed to “get a life” by people who, interestingly, display no evidence of having lives themselves. Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions. Being burned as a witch is not safely enough off the agenda. A sign has gone up in a local charity-shop window which says, baldly, “Can you spare any old records” (no question mark) and I dither daily outside on the pavement. Should I go in and mention it? It does matter that there’s no question mark on a direct question. It is appalling ignorance. But what will I do if the elderly charity-shop lady gives me the usual disbelieving stare and then tells me to bugger off, get a life and mind my own business?
On the other hand, I’m well aware there is little profit in asking for sympathy for sticklers. We are not the easiest people to feel sorry for. We refuse to patronise any shop with checkouts for “eight items or less” (because it should be “fewer”), and we got very worked up after 9/11 not because of Osama bin-Laden but because people on the radio kept saying “enormity” when they meant “magnitude”, and we really hate that. When we hear the construction “Mr Blair was stood” (instead of “standing”) we suck our teeth with annoyance, and when words such as “phenomena”, “media” or “cherubim” are treated as singular (“The media says it was quite a phenomena looking at those cherubims”), some of us cannot suppress actual screams. Sticklers never read a book without a pencil at hand, to correct the typographical errors. In short, we are unattractive know-all obsessives who get things out of proportion and are in continual peril of being disowned by our exasperated families.
I know precisely when my own damned stickler personality started to get the better of me. In the autumn of 2002, I was making a series of programmes about punctuation for Radio4 called Cutting a Dash. My producer invited John Richards of the Apostrophe Protection Society to come and talk to us. At that time, I was quite tickled by the idea of an Apostrophe Protection Society, on whose website could be found photographic examples of ungrammatical signs such as “The judges decision is final” and “No dog’s”. We took Mr Richards on a trip down Berwick Street Market to record his reaction to some green-grocers’ punctuation (“Potatoe’s” and so on), and then sat down for a chat about how exactly one goes about protecting a conventional printer’s mark that, through no fault of its own, seems to be terminally flailing in a welter of confusion.
What the APS does is write courteous letters, he said. A typical letter would explain the correct use of the apostrophe, and express the gentle wish that, should the offending “BOB,S PETS” sign (with a comma) be replaced one day, this well-meant guidance might be borne in mind. It was at this point that I felt a profound and unignorable stirring. It was the awakening of my Inner Stickler. “But that’s not enough!” I said. Suddenly I was a-buzz with ideas. What about issuing stickers printed with the words “This apostrophe is not necessary”? What about telling people to shin up ladders at dead of night with an apostrophe-shaped stencil and a tin of paint? Why did the Apostrophe Protection Society not have a militant wing? Could I start one? Where do you get balaclavas?