wisdom
, it must necessarily follow, that hereditary succession, and hereditary rights (as they are called), can make no part of it, because it is impossible to make wisdom hereditary.
Parkes writes, “The punctuation of the manuscript has been so freely corrected and adapted by later scribes, that it is not easy to determine whether any of the other ecphonetic signs are also by the original scribe or whether they have been added.” The only other person I can think of who uses old-style that-commas with any consistency is Peter Brown, who, like Parkes, spends his time with Latin quod-clauses that have been punctuated by old German commentators. (A comma is still regularly used before a daβ-clause in German.)
Another rarity in Parkes’s book, perhaps the very first of its kind, is the occurrence of the two halves of semi-colon linked, not by a hyphen, but by a full-scale em-dash: semi — colon. This elongation could be Parkes’s secret way of protesting American trends in copy-editing, which would have the noun-unit spelled without any divisive internal rule at alclass="underline" semicolon. Truly, American copy-editing has fallen into a state of demoralized confusion over hyphenated and unhyphenated compounds — or at least, I am demoralized and confused, having just gone through the manuscript of a novel in which a very smart and careful and good-natured copy-editor has deleted about two hundred of my innocent tinkertoy hyphens. I wrote “stet hyphen” in the margin so many times that I finally abbreviated it to “SH”—but there was no wicked glee in my intransigence: I didn’t want to be the typical prose prima donna who made her life difficult.
On the other hand, I remembered an earlier manuscript of mine in which an event took place in the back seat of a car: in the bound galleys, the same event occurred in the “backseat.” The backseat. Grateful for hundreds of other fixes, unwilling to seem stubborn, I had agreed without protest to the closing-up, but I stewed about it afterward and finally reinserted a space before publication. (“Backseat” wants to be read as a trochee, BACKseat, like “baseball,” when in reality we habitually give both halves of the compound equal spoken weight.) Therefore, mindful of my near miss with “back seat,” I stetted myself sick over the new manuscript. I stetted re-enter (rather than reenter), post-doc (rather than postdoc), foot-pedal (rather than foot pedal), second-hand (rather than secondhand), twist-tie (rather than twist tie), and pleasure-nubbins (rather than pleasure nubbins).
The copy-editor, because her talents permit her to be undoctrinaire, and because it is, after all, my book, indulged me, for better or worse. In passing, we had a stimulating discussion of the word pantyhose, which she had emended to read panty hose. My feeling was that the word hose is unused now in reference to footwear, and that panty, too, in its singular form, is imaginable only as part of pantywaist or in some hypothetical L. L. Bean catalog: “Bean’s finest chamois-paneled trail panty.” Pantyhose thus constitutes a single, interfused unit of sense, greater than the sum of its parts, which ought to be the criterion for jointure. And yet, though the suggested space seemed to me mistaken, I could just as easily have gone for panty-hose as pantyhose—in fact, normally I would have campaigned for a hyphen in this sort of setting, since the power-crazed policy-makers at Merriam-Webster and Words into Type have been reading too much Joyce in recent years and making condominiums out of terms (especially — like compounds, which can look like transliterated Japanese when closed up) that deserve semi-detachment. (Joyce, one feels, wanted his prose to look different, Irish, strange, not tricked out with fastidious Oxford hyphens that handled uncouth noun-clumps with gloved fingertips: he would have been embarrassed to see his idiosyncratic cuffedge and watchchain and famous scrotumtightening acting to sway US style-shepherds.) A tasteful spandex hyphen would have been, so my confusion whispers to me now, perfectly all right in panty-hose, pulling the phrase together scrotumtighteningly at its crotch.
I offer this personal note merely to illustrate how small the moments are that cumulatively result in punctuational thigmotaxis. Evolution proceeds hyphen by hyphen, and manuscript by manuscript — impelled by the tension between working writers and their copy-editors, and between working copy-editors and their works of reference (“I’ll just go check the big Web,” a magazine editor once said to me cheerfully); by the admiration of ancestors, and by the ever-imminent possibility of paralysis through boredom. Are the marks that we have right now really enough? Don’t you sometimes feel a sudden abdominal cramp of revulsion when you scan down a column of type and see several nice little clauses (only one per sentence, of course: Chic. Man. St. § 5.91) set off by cute little pairs of unadorned dashes?
The nineteenth century didn’t think the dash on its own was nearly enough. Dr. Parkes ends his brief discussion of “The Mimetic Ambitions of the Novelist and the Exploitation of the Pragmatics of the Written Medium” with Virginia Woolf, so he (pardonably) avoids treating the single most momentous change in twentieth-century punctuation, namely the disappearance of the great dash-hybrids. All three of them — the commash, — , the semi-colash ;—, and the colash :— (so I name them, because naming makes analysis possible) — are of profound importance to Victorian prose, and all three are now (except for certain revivalist zoo specimens to be mentioned later) extinct.
Everyone used dash-hybrids. They are in Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Brontë, and George Meredith. They are on practically every page of Trollope—
He was nominally, not only the heir to, but actually the possessor of, a large property;—but he could not touch the principal, and of the income only so much as certain legal curmudgeons would allow him. As Greystock had said, everybody was at law with him, — so successful had been his father, in mismanaging, and mis-controlling, and misappropriating the property.
Rapid writing will no doubt give rise to inaccuracy, — chiefly because the ear, quick and true as may be its operation, will occasionally break down under pressure, and, before a sentence be closed, will forget the nature of the composition with which it commenced.
The novels of a man possessed of so singular a mind must themselves be very strange, — and they are strange.
They are in Thackeray—
[…] the Captain was not only accustomed to tell the truth, — he was unable even to think it — and fact and fiction reeled together in his muzzy, whiskified brain.
And in George Eliot—
The general expectation now was that the “much” would fall to Fred Vincy, but the Vincys themselves were surprised when ten thousand pounds in specified investments were declared to be bequeathed to him — was the land coming too?
The toniest nonfictional Prosicrucians — De Quincey, Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Doughty — also make constant use of dashtards, often at rhetorical peaks: