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.

It is the day after St. Patrick's Day, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, shaking, or otherwise mixing drinks of any kind, for all the little drunks are now too hung over for words to describe. This is a good thing, I think, primarily because young persons do not learn anything unless the anything involved hits them very hard on their incredibly obtuse skulls. This is a lesson that most educators do not grasp fully. Your average teacher still believes that he or she is preparing young minds for the future, whereas your average American high school is simply a very large warehouse where civil servants can collect large paychecks and where the hormonally engorged can conduct their social lives away from their parents' supervision; if someone actually does learn something every once in a while, this is nice, to be sure, but not terribly germane. For this crowd, this is why St. Patrick's Day, or St. Paddy's Day, as they prefer to call it, exists. The day exists so that they may leave their suburban warrens and descend upon the great metropolis, eager to suck up any alcohol they can get their hands on, sit on the big rocks in Central Park, and smoke pot, if alcohol is not immediately available. They won't spend any time, if they can help it, actually watching the parade, although in their defense, I must say that watching oddly dressed pedestrians strolling down the street amidst a self-generated megadecibel cacophony loses interest after a while; said cacophony also damages your eardrums. But they don't forget the patron of the day, the reason that they are wandering around the streets of the metropolis in a drunken stupor. No indeed, scarce five minutes went by yesterday without at least one of these bright young cretins shouting, "St. Paddy's Day! St. Paddy's Day!" This announcement of what everyone already knows was almost inevitably followed by the pronouncement, "I am so totally fucking wasted!", which was also something everyone else could figure out for themselves. It has been a while since I attended Catholic school, and no, I am not going to give a specific figure for just how long a while it has been, but as I remember it, the importance of Patrick came from his conversion of the Irish from paganism to Christianity. I am sure if the central tenet of Irish Christianity was "Let's get hammered" one of the nuns would have told me so. Or maybe I was just sick that day and missed the class. That's always a possibility, I suppose.

ST. PADDY'S DAY BLUES: Saint Patrick’s Day has come and gone for another year, as it is wont to do, and once again, I didn’t enjoy the parade from the confines of our happy little burg. I had great plans for going to the great metropolis to view amidst my ethnic brethren the passing parade of bagpipers, politicians, and other noisy windbags, but if you have spent any time at all this past week watching the Weather Channel, you will know that spring is not exactly busting out all over here in the northeastern United States. No indeed, here in the northeastern United States most of us are wondering just why couldn’t Saint Patrick, good and holy man that he was, find a better day to drop dead on, a day, perhaps in late June or, better yet, in the middle of August, when the kids would be out of school and everyone would be in a partying mood. Here in this our Great Republic there are no public holidays at all in August; the summer goes from the Fourth of July to Labor Day in September with nary a break in the action between.

It’s not like other people don’t do have their ethnic celebrations in the spring and summer already. The Puerto Rican Day Parade is usually in late June, usually on the feast day of Saint John the Baptist, and that parade pulls in people like nobody’s business. Once upon a time in America, the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade was the biggest parade in the ethnic pride game, the champ o’champs, in a manner of speaking, but all of that is one with Nineveh and Tyre now, I fear; the Puerto Ricans have the Irish beat hands down when it comes to parades these days. You can ascribe the reason to any number of different things: salsa is easier on the nerves than bagpipers, the chicas are usually easier on the eyes than the colleens, although I shouldn’t say such a thing in public, and the Irish all live in the suburbs now and prefer to watch the parade on television just like other Americans, while the Puerto Ricans still live in the city and can get to the parade on mass transit. These, of course, are mere rationalizations. The reason the Puerto Rican Day Parade can draw more people is that the Puerto Ricans don’t have to worry about a foot of snow falling the day before the parade. March weather is famously variable, much like the Irish themselves; sometimes you will get a parade day that is warm and sunshiny, and other years, like this one, you will find that winter likes it here in this part of our Great Republic and has no intention of moving on peacefully, even if you call the cops.

I suppose I could have gone to the parade, if I’d really put my mind to it; the railroad announced that they were running special express trains down to the city so people could get to the parade more or less on time; I even heard some of those trains go by. It’s just that to get to the train I had to exhume my car from beneath a veritable Chimborazo of snow first, and this, as with so many things in life, was very easy to say and not quite as easy to do.

Among the complicating factors was our happy little burg’s own highway department. The boys love a good snowstorm, because it lets them show their stuff to maximum effect. During the warm months of the year, a good many people wonder just what in the hell the highway department does with all of its time and our tax money, especially since all anyone ever sees them do when it’s warm out is stand around holes of varying sizes in the road discussing what to do next while wearing orange reflective vests and hard hats and not really doing very much about the hole. In winter, though, the boys down at the highway department come into their own. Let the weatherman predict a couple of inches of snow and they leap into action. Hardly a snowflake will have touched the ground before they are out with the sanders and the snowplows, spreading sand and salt and good cheer amongst all and sundry, pushing the snow off the roads so nervous motorists can go about their business in relative safety. This is a good thing, I think, and the citizens of our happy little burg ought to thank the highway department and all of its minions for the good job they do in clearing the streets of unwanted precipitation.

But Einstein, or someone else way smarter than me, explained that matter and energy are really one and the same thing, and because of this, therefore, you could not destroy matter, only transform it into something else. Thus it is with snow. When the highway department comes through clearing the streets with their plows, they are not actually getting rid of the snow; they are taking the snow in the road, which prevents people from using the roads safely, and moving the damnable stuff into people’s driveways, which prevents people from using the roads at all. It is small wonder, then, that there are so few traffic accidents after the plows have come through a given neighborhood: in order to have a traffic accident, you must have traffic, which isn’t going to happen until the populace can dig their cars out from under of the twelve inches of snow that just fell in their driveways and the several feet of snow the highway department just shoved on top of the snow you haven’t managed to get rid of yet. Some people have complained about this in the past, to little or no effect; the snow in the road has to go somewhere and the highway department takes the view that where the snow goes after they’ve moved it out of the streets is the snow’s own business; it’s a free country, after all, and the complainers should be happy that the highway department is providing settlers in our happy little burg with ramparts that will withstand the most vigorous Indian attack until the cavalry arrives, assuming, of course, that the cavalry doesn’t have to use the local streets.

In addition to this, one must always expect the utterly expectable. You do not go to a bordello, Mel Brooks once remarked, and then complain to the management that the place is not a Howard Johnson’s. Life is not like that. Deserts are hot in the daylight and cold at night. Rivers are, almost without exception, fairly wet. Pistachios, if consumed in large enough quantities, will cause your gall bladder to rebel. There is something newsworthy happening right now in the Middle East. Letting your little brother borrow your snow blower is not a good idea. These all fall in the realm of the expectable. You should not expect that something different from what you know to expect to occur. It will not. The wise man will know that it is in the nature of little brothers to borrow snow blowers and tell you that you will get the device, which you bought for well over $700, back shortly. This is a delusion. It will not happen. You will stand next to your car, your heart pounding dangerously in your chest as you shovel and shovel and shovel like there’s no tomorrow, and in this case, there isn’t; nobody has a day after Saint Patrick’s Day parade; and there your little brother is, steadily pushing your snow blower and using the gas you bought for the purpose of clearing your driveway to clear his driveway. Your little brother will be big about the situation, though; after he has used all of your gas he will help you dig your car out, and with his contribution to the task at hand, you will have the car out of the snow bank and ready to go to the train station in time for the Puerto Rican Day Parade. I guess that’s something.