Is a full stop really worth four commas? And should everybody avoid the semi-colon? This book from the popular linguist David Crystal will amuse and instruct

A couple of weeks ago I saw David Crystal give an after-dinner speech at the august annual conference of the Society of Indexers and the Society for Editors and Proofreaders. In it, he recalled having been an adviser on Lynne Truss’s radio programme about punctuation. She told him she was thinking of writing a book on the subject. He advised her not to: “Nobody buys books on punctuation.” “Three million books later,” he said, “I hate her.”

Making a Point is this prolific popular linguist’s entry into the same, or a similar, market. Truss’s book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, was energised by her furious certainties about the incorrect use of all these little marks. Crystal’s is a soberer and, actually, more useful affair: he puts Truss’s apostrophe-rage in its sociolinguistic context, considers the evolution of modern usages, and gently encourages the reader to think in a nuanced way about how marks work rather than imagining that some Platonic style guide, if only it could be accessed, would sort all punctuation decisions into boxes marked “literate” and “illiterate”. (Or literate and illiterate, if you prefer.)

As Crystal writes, scribes started to punctuate in order to make manuscripts easier to read aloud: they were signalling pauses and intonational effects. Grammarians and, later, printers adopted the marks, and tried to systematise them, as aids to semantic understanding on the page. The marks continue to serve both purposes. “This,” Crystal writes, “is where we see the origins of virtually all the arguments over punctuation that have continued down the centuries and which are still with us today.”

His central argument, buttressed by countless well-chosen examples and enlivened by the odd whimsical digression, is that neither a phonetic, nor a semantic, nor a grammatical account of our punctuation system is singly sufficient. Those hoping to make punctuation logically consistent are chasing a will o’ the wisp – and ignoring the aesthetics and the pragmatics of practice. But nor is it a complete free-for-all. There are discoverable rules, or at least workable generalisations, about how punctuation functions. However, they are discoverable by the study of usage rather than from old school textbooks.

The Oxford or serial comma (“sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll”; versus “sex, drugs and rock and roll”) excoriated by self-styled “purists”, for instance, is perfectly reasonable usage: in fact, it was general before the comma-free version. Not a trivial finding, considering that ignorant prejudice against the serial comma was written into the guidelines for marking a nationwide 2013 spelling and grammar test for 10-year-olds. Give the phrase “Silly Mr Gove” a question mark or an exclamation mark as you prefer.

And what is the system-builder to make of the fact that the London tube takes you from Earl’s Court to Barons Court in a single stop – to say nothing of the headache-inducing history of the apostrophes in Harrods, Selfridges and (a horror, this) Lloyds?

Crystal walks us through the history behind all this, and then goes mark to mark or, if you like, point-to-point. The big four – comma, semicolon, colon and full stop – were for a long time, and insanely, regarded as precise measurements of a pause: a full stop was worth four commas. The book’s full of this sort of curio: interesting on first encounter; illuminating on investigation.

Some marks are easier than others. Commas are a mare’s nest. Crystal identifies a non-restrictive list of 11 distinct non-specialist functions for the exclamation mark. Apostrophes – because among the most recently adopted for general use, and so presumably a locus for anxiety – occasion the most strident prescriptive hissy fits. And as for hyphens and dashes – let’s not even go there. Fowler reported “chaos”; Benbow wrote, “If you take hyphens seriously you will surely go mad.”

Even among careful writers, a degree of interest in punctuation is not guaranteed. William Wordsworth was happy to let others sort it out for him, and asked Sir Humphry Davy (a chemist whom he’d never even met) to correct the second edition of Lyrical Ballads for publication. You might, incidentally, illustrate Crystal’s points about the semantic and pragmatic qualities of punctuation with the parenthesis in that last sentence. Consider the different degrees of authorial sniggering conveyed if, between “chemist” and “whom”, you interpolate a comma, a semicolon, a dash or an exclamation mark …

Ben Jonson, on the other hand, went bananas about printers mispunctuating his work, and denounced one in a poem as a “lewd printer” and an “absolute knave”. Mark Twain, on hearing that a proofreader was improving his punctuation, “telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray”. George Bernard Shaw was with Cormac McCarthy on the apostrophe: “There is not the faintest reason for persisting in the ugly and silly trick of peppering pages with these uncouth bacilli.” George Orwell took a firm stand against the semicolon; though, poignantly, he worried nobody would notice so wrote to his publisher to boast that Coming Up for Air didn’t contain any.

There might have been room for more of this sort of jollity. A sidebar on rock and pop crimes against punctuation wouldn’t have gone amiss. Whither the spurious heavy-metal diaeresis? Whence the Cranberries’ song “Yeat’s Grave” (shudder)? And WTF was Neil Sedaka’s “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do”, with its refrain “Down dooby doo down down/ Comma comma”, all about?

I slightly yearned for a bit more on the outriders, too: that lovely cavalcade of defunct and obscure marks that are glimpsed in the text and add salt to his fine index: the asterism, the dinkus and the fleuron; the austere pilcrow and the honourable diple; the breve and the manicule (shown to such excellent advantage in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa); or the caret that helps you see in the dark.

But that is, as it were, in parenthesis. Here is a learned and subtle book that amuses as it instructs, and instructs as it amuses. It deserves to sell three million, and won’t.

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