PUNCTUATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS: National Punctuation Day was September 24th this year and it pains me to admit that I missed the great day completely. This was entirely my own fault; I simply wasn’t paying enough attention and the day went by with nary a hosanna in praise of the period or a paean to the delights of the semicolon from me. To all, I wish to apologize deeply for this unconscionable oversight. People do not pay enough attention to punctuation; punctuation lacks the solemn personal dignity of the nouns or the vigorous get up and go of the verbs, and punctuation certainly lacks even the sheer descriptive power of even the most overworked of adjectives; but in its own small way punctuation makes the simple English sentence both simple and possible. How would anyone know what a sentence is supposed to sound like without the punctuation? If a true sentence must, as the nuns taught me, contain a complete thought, how would I know when the thought, and therefore the sentence, was complete, beyond the traditional one of graduating from high school? Without punctuation, The Cat in the Hat would be as difficult to read as Finnegan’s Wake, and a troupe of actors on Benzedrine could perform the complete works of Shakespeare (including the sonnets and the long poems) in just under forty-five minutes, if you don’t include the time spent on psychotic giggling, bathroom breaks, or police raids.

We use punctuation every day, and yet many people cannot identify any but the most common punctuation marks. Everyone can identify a comma or a period, of course—they are the stars of the punctuation universe—but not many people can tell you that # is an octothorpe. Fewer people still can tell you that an umlaut (¨) is not some creepy guy who tries to take advantage of intoxicated women during Oktoberfest, that tilde (~) is not the character Rosalind Russell played in His Girl Friday, or that the circumflex (^) is not an incredibly popular French exercise machine. Even if they know the name of the mark they are using, many people still misuse punctuation all the time. Is there a more abused member of the English punctuation family than the simple apostrophe (’)? In a classic error, one that almost every Anglophone has made at one time or another, its and it’s are not the same word and do not mean the same thing. Its is a possessive pronoun; it’s is a contraction of it is. And since contractions fill the English language in much the same way that the dead fill the voter rolls in Chicago, the chances of some careless writer dropping the apostrophe grow exponentially with every word they write. Some writers choose to eliminate the apostrophe altogether, even if, as in the case of cant and wont, the words have nothing to do with can’t or won’t. Punctuation is, I think, one of the great inventions of the human mind; it clarifies the dense and often opaque mush of language into an easily understandable form; and it boggles the imagination that people went for thousands of years without it.

Punctuation, it may surprise you to learn, did not arrive along with the invention of written language, although you’d think the need for it would be immediately obvious. The Sumerians, who invented writing to help them collect sales taxes and then used their invention to help them dodge those same taxes, did not use punctuation at all. If a scribe reading his cuneiform tablets droned on for longer than the listener was prepared to listen, the listener would ask the scribe to stop, or, if time was short, the listener would simply bash the scribe into unconsciousness with a large rock. Being a scribe was a dangerous trade in Sumer, and among the first occupational safety laws archaeology knows of are found on a cuneiform tablet that dates from approximately 3500 BCE, which required scribes to wear helmets whenever they had to read any document longer than two tablets to the easily distractible public.

The Egyptians had no apparent need for punctuation, a contention that many Egyptologists now feel is not altogether accurate; a hieroglyph of a boy choking a cat is, many scholars believe, the first use of the semicolon. The ancient Hebrews eliminated punctuation along with vowels in order to save space—the Ten Commandments did without both, for example, so Moses would not herniate himself on the way down Sinai—the lack of both does lead one to think that the Ten Commandments may qualify as history’s first tweet—and the ancient Greeks could have used punctuation—Aristotle first advance the possibility in the Nichomachean Ethics—but chose not to do anything with the idea; keeping the punctuation out kept everyone except the speaker from getting a word in edgewise, an always important skill in Greek politics.

After the Aristotelian false start, punctuation waited for another millennium for its ineluctable rediscovery, if can call Aristotle’s one line afterthought a discovery in the first place, by Christian monks in the years after the conversion of the Irish. Soon after St. Patrick converted all the land to Christianity, it became clear to him that the traditional Irish form of writing, Ogham, was not adequate to meet the needs of his ever-growing congregation. Ogham, a series of lines and symbols cut into a vertical axis, looked good cut into a large stone, but to Patrick’s Romanized eye Ogham lacked the both the dignity and the utility of the Latin alphabet. The introduction of the Latin alphabet, which, if you didn’t already know, is what you’re reading right now, proved a boon as the Irish (except, of course, for the Ogham chisellers, who had to find other work and were therefore not inclined to help Patrick at all) entered into the spiritual life of the Church with the zeal of the newly converted, giving up everything to lead the monastic life and serve the Church by leading lives of piety, poverty, chastity, and copying.

Copying was a big part of Irish spirituality in those years. The Roman Empire in the West had shuffled off this mortal coil the century before, leaving a big stack of stuff in the Church’s in-basket to do by the time it got back from vacation. Well, the Roman Empire in the West never did make it back from vacation (the Roman Empire in the East continued onwards and upwards for another thousand years, but that’s another story, and one that did not require copying and collating parchment in bulk), but the Irish Church decided that this was work that needed doing anyway and that the swarms of devout new monks were just the ones to do it. The monks agreed and set off on their tasks with a high heart and a prayer on their lips. It did not take the monks long to discover, however, that the Romans, the Greeks, and the Israelites all suffered from the same curse—they didn’t know when to shut up, a failing that carried over into their literatures and even into Scripture, and if they (the monks) were ever going to get a bite to eat or something to drink down at the pub they would have to do something to cut the graphomanical enthusiasms of the ancients down to a reasonable length.

To that worthy end, one Father Ambrose, a young monk at the monastery at Clonmacnoise, one day decided that he’d had enough of Roman politics in the form of Cicero’s denunciations of Catiline in the Roman Senate (Cicero thought that Catiline was a lying traitorous two-bit punk and wasn’t afraid to say so, but Cicero was also a politician who loved the sound of his own voice—what politician doesn’t—and so expounded on Catiline’s faults at considerable length and for hours on end, something politicians could do in ancient Rome, given that no one had cable yet) and in disgust threw his quill pen down at the manuscript. A bit of ink flew from the nib and landed at the end of the last word Father Ambrose had copied. The good monk looked at what he had done and in a flash of incredible insight saw that it was good. In fact, he shouted, ‘Hallelujah,’ or something roughly equivalent to that worthy word of divine praise. One witness to the event said later that he was pretty sure Father Ambrose had said, ‘Hot Damn,’ but very few people credit his account.

After the invention of the period, Irish monasteries entered an age of punctuational brilliance; the monks invented the colon, the semicolon, the comma, and the dash in short order. They had to give up the dash; the Pope declared its use sinful in 619 CE; but they invented the ampersand (&) and the asterisk (*), and were working on the apostrophe when Viking raiders sacked Clonmacnoise and took the punctuation back to Scandinavia with them. From that time punctuation has spread like high taxes from one end of the earth to the other, and yet people still do not know how to use it correctly, leading to the popularity of such usage guides as Eats, Shoots & Leaves. In other cases, punctuational overuse has led to a backlash. The constant use of colons in modern society, for example, led to a movement that demands that we rid the language of the mark entirely. On the cable channels, one can see one infomercial after another telling the gullible American viewing public how to detoxify the user’s constant use of the colon. Such extremism will not catch on with much of the public; the colon is simply too useful for anyone to do away with it entirely; but it is clear that punctuational abuse and misuse are among the largest obstacles to teaching schoolchildren how to write properly and that the schools are simply not doing enough to address this unfortunate situation.

BEARDING, A LESSON IN NO PARTS: To begin, we must first point out that the existence of the beard is, before it is anything else, a philosophical question, at least in the West, whereas in other cultures the beard is not merely simply a matter of philosophy, but one of theology. Orthodox Jews, for example, refrain from shaving, obeying Leviticus’ command that the Children of Israel, or at least the male portion thereof, shall not mar the corners of their beards; whether the bearded ladies at the circus must comply with this commandment is a subject of debate. Devout Muslims do not shave either, but, following the example of the Prophet (peas be upon him), they will clip their mustaches away from their upper lip. Sikhs are the champions of theological hirsuteness here, however, as the tenets of that faith not only forbid the devout to cut their beards, but any other bodily hair as well, which taboo goes a long way towards explaining why there are so few photographs of devout Sikh girls in bikinis. In contrast, Christians, at least here in this our Great Republic, represent a clear-cut victory for Saint Jerome.

In the fourth century, a group of Christian theology students in Alexandria came to blows, a common enough event for Christian theology students then and for centuries afterwards, over the question of how long a beard should be in order to demonstrate the wearer’s personal sanctity. After a night of exhaustive theological and pugilistic investigation of this admittedly arcane bit of dogma, someone hit upon the bright idea of asking the great scholar and Biblical translator Jerome for a ruling on the matter. So the collected students hied themselves and their black eyes down to the great library of Alexandria to pose the question to the saint.

Our seekers after knowledge found Jerome (or Hieronymous, if you people prefer the original with all this Bosch) standing at the circulation desk arguing with one of the clerks about his overdue copy of Valley of the Dolls. The students, in a burst of youthful enthusiasm, which is always the most annoying kind, breathlessly asked their tonsorial question of Jerome, an irascible man in the best of times—he once called someone who disagreed with him an ignorant calumniator, stuffed with Irish porridge (clearly, a man who knew how to vent and to vent well)—and now a man driven to new heights of irascibility because of the clerk’s obstinate refusal to let him keep the book out a little longer so he could translate the good bits into Latin. Jerome told the students, with perhaps more heat than charity, that if sanctity depended on the length of one’s beard, nothing in the Lord’s creation would be holier than a goat. Then, driven to distraction and left there without a return ticket, the great saint hurled anathemas at the students, as well as volume I of the Oxford Latin Dictionary (Aardvarkus to Aggravatedus), and the chastened students fled for their lives from the saint’s onslaught, returning to their usual haunts to discuss the theological significance of the goat. As per usual, the conversation grew heated and the neighbors then called the police to suppress the rioting. In the end, only three people were killed and 27 goats reported missing, although the police later found five of them tied up behind Jamaican restaurants on Alexandria’s west side. The owners declared that they had no idea how the goats got there.

I bring up all this aggressive hirsute shilly-shallying because I now have a beard and I am under some very substantial pressure from a number of people to get rid of the thing. My mother, for one, has never liked beards and finds the prospect of looking at mine for any prolonged length of time a prospect to horrifying to contemplate. Mom does not like anything that reminds her that she is, as she puts it, getting on a bit, although I should point out here that at 82 she is not getting on, she’s got on, and no, that is not something I would say to her face, thank you very much, and therefore having to look at her eldest son’s impression of Robert E. Lee is as grim a memento mori as you can find here in our happy little burg. The kid next door, an obnoxious munchkin as viciously noxious as she is relentlessly ob, takes my mother’s side of the argument and does so with no end of sonic gusto, usually in as close a proximity to my ears as she can manage. Scarcely a day goes by hereabouts that I do not hear that annoying little cockroach bellowing her incessant demand that I shave the ugly gray ferret off my face, and scarcely a day goes by that I do not wonder why I didn’t smother the rotten brat with a pillow when I had the chance. Ah well, it’s too late for regrets now, I suppose.

On the other hand, a good many people like the new look, something that I find very heartening. I look, depending on whom you talk to, like a professor, which is what I started out to be all those years ago, or Ernest Hemingway, a comparison I simultaneously love and loathe—I admire Hemingway the writer a great deal and I dislike Hemingway the man about as much; the type of person who could write the kind of nasty hatchet jobs that appear in A Moveable Feast is not the sort of person I would want to know personally. And, apparently, I look like Santa Claus, a resemblance that has led more than one youngster to sidle up to me and mutter, “I wanna Playstation.” I must admit that since growing the beard I am taking a good deal of pleasure in playing the Anti-Claus and telling them that they can’t have one unless they beat up their little sisters two days before Christmas, and that they may get nothing at all this year because the cookies they left out for me last year were so stale that the reindeer wouldn’t eat the damn things, and let’s face it, reindeer are neither the pickiest of eaters nor are they the brightest bulbs in the box; if the reindeer won’t eat the cookies, no one else will. I may not stop Christmas from coming this year, but I managed to take some of the shine off of the holiday, especially if you happen to be a little sister hereabouts just a couple days before Christmas, and before you start calling me names, let me reiterate my long held position that Ebenezer Scrooge was a deeply misunderstood man and that the Grinch was a equally unappreciated…well, whatever grinches are, with or without the tight shoes, they are unappreciated.

But the best opinion of all came from my brother, who agrees with my mother, thinks that the beard should go sooner rather than later, and says that the damn beard makes me look like a refugee from the ZZ Top Fan Club. This is fine by me; I’ve been a fan of the Texas rockers for years now, so if I’m going to look like I’m with the band, I might as well keep the beard. Like the boys say, every girl’s crazy about a sharp-dressed man. Of course, ZZ Top is not the sharpest looking band around—I think they look like the miner ‘49 and his daughter, Clementine, especially the latter—but then again, they don’t have to look sharp. Unlike me, they’re actually with the band.

MY APOLOGIES, OR MORE EXCUSES, A CONTINUING MELODRAMA: Okay, folks, I realize that I gave an absolute guarantee that there would be a new piece here by last Monday. The fact that you are reading yet another mea culpa for it not being here is not through any lack of willingness on my part, but rather said lack is the unfortunate byproduct of the large scale viral invasion of my upper respiratory tract this past week. It was a wonderful invasion, as invasions go; I got to play the part of Wake Island as my immune system and the viruses fought it out for control of my destiny. I am hear to announce that, unlike the Marines at Wake Island, the immune system has beaten back the invasion and that I am now well on my way to full recovery. It still hurts when I cough, but this is a vast improvement over laying on my back and looking up at my ceiling (which is peeling, by the way; I will have to get around that shortly) and wishing that I were dead. So, let me reassure you, the readers, on a couple of points: first, there is a new piece (and no, this is not it) completely written out and about halfway typed up, and second, that this piece shall be posted to this site no later than Monday of this coming week. I absolutely guarantee this, barring a relapse or some other act of God. Then you can blame God; that's His job, apparently.