Wednesday, August 24, 2016

A punctuation deficiency: pauses and lack thereof

I was going to write a post about punctuation.  It got away from me.  Repeatedly.

So just quickly what got me on the subject: pauses.

If people wrote with pedantic perfection there would be no way to mark a pause other than writing "pause" or "there was a pause here" or something like that.

The ellipsis is supposed to denote omissions.  Thus
"I was . . . doing . . . things."
is in pedantic perfection land a way to write "I was [snip] doing [snip] things," and not a way to write "I was" pause "doing" pause "things."

I'm all for the "Fuck That" position and in fact I never use a bare ellipsis to mark omission for fear that it will be confused for a pause.  If I want to mark omission I bracket my ellipses (e.g. [...].)

The closest I come to bare ellipsis for omission is using it as a fade in/fade out thing in certain quotes:
". . . [quoted words go here] . . ."
But my point here is not that it's wonderful that the English writing world, apparently as a whole, appears to be saying, "Fuck correct usage, we need a way to mark pauses," but rather that the ellipsis is the only pause marker in our punctuation and it's not intended to be used as such.

That's . . . a massive fucking oversight.

The only other punctuation mark that can be argued to deal with pacing at all is the semicolon when it's used to conjoin sentences.  This argument can be disputed, but generally it's probably safe to assume that in the following examples
I ate it.  It was good.
I ate it; it was good.
There's a shorter pause between the two "it"s in the second example than in the first.

* * *

Why does this matter to me?  It fucks me up, constantly.

Most pauses are not actually long enough to justify an ellipsis, but they still matter (to me at least.)

Consider this delivery of this sentence:
"Tara stood there for a while" no pause "and she decided to stay" short pause "and listen" end stop.
 You can't write that with proper English punctuation.

Properly punctuated the sentence is this:
Tara stood there for a while, and she decided to stay and listen.
The comma is used to separate the two halves of the compound sentence, it is not used to separate the two verbs that share a subject.  Thus there's a comma where the pause isn't and no marker of any kind of where the pause is.

The only thing I can think of would be to steal from poetry and add a caesura, though as a purely notational point, I tend to use the musical  symbol (//) rather than the poetic one (||).

So then we get:
Tara stood there for a while, and she decided to stay // and listen.
But there's still no indication you're not supposed to pause at the comma and . . . I've got no fucking clue what to do with that.

One thought was to have a "skip over this" arrow.  There is not in fact a "skip over this" combing character, so I have no idea if this will display correctly on a computer other than my own.
"Tara stood there for a while , ↷ and she decided to stay // and listen."
Another thought was that in informal English writing we've developed a pause shortener that might, possibly, be able to be used as a diacritic.

We recognize that:
She said, "Oh-my-god-it's-so-good-to-see-you."
is meant to be taken as spoken quickly to the point of at least partially omitting the usual pause between  words that we'd assume if we read:
She said, "Oh my god, it's so good to see you."
We thus have a situation where adding a mark (putting the "-" into what was empty space) means that the pace is moving more quickly than would be assumed without the mark.  And, yes, we can find a combining dash to give us ",̵ ".

Though it's worth noting that the combining dash used here actually sticks out a bit.  As a simple example, if I stick a line "|" after it, where we might expect a space like there is between a normal dash and a a line "-|" the two meld " ̵|".  That same sticking out eats a following space, so in the example below there are actually two spaces after dashed comma:
Tara stood there for a while,̵  and she decided to stay // and listen.
That's something that it would take a lot of getting used to.  Another option would be to omit the following space to mark the lack of pause:
Tara stood there for a while,and she decided to stay // and listen.
Which looks like a typo.

Which is sort of the point.  Nothing is going to look right because the punctuation marks I've been raised with are completely ill-equipped to deal with something as simple as "there's not a fucking pause here so don't pause."

Nor are they equipped to mark any pause smaller than ". . .".

It's fucked up.

And here's what usually ends up happening.  I think:
"Tara stood there for a while" no pause "and she decided to stay" short pause "and listen" end stop
and write
Tara stood there for a while and she decided to stay, and listen.

which is wrong in two ways.  There's a comma where one doesn't belong, and there isn't one where one does belong.

In my one professional story I think my tendency to do that sort of thing drove the editor to tears.

7 comments:

  1. Like, the professional published story in the book?

    I do think leaving commas out makes sense but I do also wish there were more markings to indicate, or at least offer guidance, when it comes to reading out loud...

    (I might be addicted to ellipses...)

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  2. Also there are just a frillion informal punctuation usages I've seen around fandom and the internet in general and adopted.

    Like I was using the dash thing yesterday at Ana's... (I'm reeaally addicted to dashes, too!) describing phenomena such as White-Girl-actually-named-Becky-appropriates-All-The-Things...

    And I've gotten in the habit of denoting varieties of a given characters with adjectives crammed on the front with an exclamation point in between. I think I got that from Usenet or something, and maybe there was a plaintext reason or some jargon source that I don't know about. Frex, Artist!Steve, Fem!Thorin, FullyHuman!Jesus, TotallyMom!Loki etc.

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    Replies
    1. And I've gotten in the habit of denoting varieties of a given characters with adjectives crammed on the front with an exclamation point in between. I think I got that from Usenet or something, and maybe there was a plaintext reason or some jargon source that I don't know about.

      I'm told this derives from "bang paths", an early form of email address.

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    2. It can also be easily updated to dot addressing, so that LB!God = God.LB, the god of Left Behind.

      I think that formal punctuation is not intended primarily to represent speech accurately but to make the meaning of that speech clear. I can read and understand far faster than I can listen to and understand someone saying the same words (try it with a variable-speed media player). Really one would expect the IPA to have a better representation of pauses, but it doesn't seem to; just a generic (...) for a gap, and that's not often used.

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    3. I think that formal punctuation is not intended primarily to represent speech accurately but to make the meaning of that speech clear.

      This is what makes certain omissions in our punctuation especially odd. The big one is not having a reverse comma.

      If additions were marked not by [standard comma] [text] [standard comma] but instead [reverse comma] [text] [standard comma] then the majority of comma ambiguity would disappear. Both sides of the Oxford Comma War bring up examples of ambiguity resulting from it being unclear when something is an item in a list, or in apposition. That would never happen if we had a reverse comma because items in lists would always be preceded by the standard comma while items in apposition would always be preceded by the reverse comma. It would give commas-offsets the same symbolic clarity as things in brackets or parentheses.

      Two other obvious things, which have been suggested but not used, are letting question and exclamation marks go at places other than the end of a sentence. (The suggestion is for them to have commas at the bottom.)

      It's kind of weird that we don't do this.

      Consider: "Jake, you know him, is coming."

      Is "you know him" a statement or a question? As written it can be either. Total lack of clarity. It could be a reminder that, "Yes, you do know him," or it could be a question, "Do you know Jake? Tell me after I finish saying what I originally intended to say."

      Those are massively different meanings. This could easily be solved by a question-comma.

      Also, the question comma and exclamation comma are logical extensions of the way we already do things.

      A period marks the end of a complete sentence while what we stick over it marks how the sentence was said. If there's nothing then it was said neutrally, if there is a vertical line then it was exclaimed, and if there's a shepherd's crook shape above the period then it was said interrogatively.

      It makes sense to be able to stick the marks above the period over other things. Consider, "He was ..." versus "He was .?." It's the exact same distinction that causes us to have separate question marks and periods, but this time it's for an incomplete sentence.

      -

      For what it's worth, the exclamation comma wouldn't, I think, do that much to make the meaning of speech more clear. You can see exactly where you'd use it:

      Our team, the best team ever,! is gonna win.

      The overall sentence is not exclaimed, the aside is. However, unless you had reason to expect the offset phrase was ironic or downright sarcastic, I think you'd get that message without the exclamation comma. Then again there are few places outside of the interrobang's digraph form (!?) where an exclamation point really makes meaning more clear than the substitution of a period would have.

      In my view the exclamation point is all style, little to no substance. (Not that I hold that against it.)

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    4. I think there are occasional good uses for exclamation marks, but not many. (The informal speech style "I! Said! Get! Down!" for example.)

      I'm still vaguely considering the concept of a constructed language with reverse-Polish notation and numbered backreference markers.

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