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Points and Pauses

Gertrude Stein’s 1935 lecture “Poetry and Grammar” includes a section on punctuation, for which she had a peculiar disdain:

There are some punctuations that are interesting and there are some punctuations that are not. Let us begin with the punctuations that are not. Of these the one but the first and the most the completely most uninteresting is the question mark. The question mark is alright when it is all alone when it is used as a brand on cattle or when it could be used in decoration but connected with writing it is completely entirely completely uninteresting.

In 2000, Kenneth Goldsmith rather archly removed the words from this passage and offered the bare punctuation as a poem titled “Gertrude Stein’s Punctuation from ‘Gertrude Stein on Punctuation'” (the full passage and the poem are both here). Goldsmith did the same thing with the punctuation chapter from Strunk & White’s Elements of Style and with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses — a few hyphens and a period.

Carl Reuterswärd’s 1960 novel Prix Nobel consists entirely of punctuation marks. Reuterswärd felt that ordinary writing robs punctuation of its meaning; the surrounding words convey concepts and the commas, colons, and periods simply help to mark it. Removing the words, though, revealed an “interesting alternative: not to ignore syntax but certainly to forgo ‘the preserved meaning of others.’ The ‘absence’ that occurs is not mute. For want of ‘governing concepts’ punctuation marks lose their neutral value. They begin to speak an unuttered language out of that already expressed. This cannot help producing a ‘colon concept’ in you, a need of exclamation, of pauses, of periods, of parentheses.”

In 2005, Chinese novelist Hu Wenliang offered 140,000 yuan ($16,900 U.S.) to the reader who could decipher his novel «?», which consists entirely of punctuation marks.

The autobiography of the American eccentric “Lord” Timothy Dexter (1748-1806) contains 8,847 words and no punctuation. When readers complained, he added a page of punctuation marks to the second edition, inviting them to “peper and solt it as they plese.”

06/30/2022 More: Reader Kevin Orlin Johnson sent this poem by David Morice, from the February 2012 issue of Word Ways:

% , & –
+ . ? /
“ :
% ;
+ $ [ \

It’s a limerick:

Percent comma ampersand dash
Plus period question mark slash
Quotation mark colon
Percent semicolon
Plus dollar sign bracket backslash

(Thanks, Kevin.)

| Language · Literature

Clairvoyance

When Raymond Smullyan was teaching probability at Princeton, he told one class about the birthday paradox — the fact that if there are 23 people in a room, the chances are greater than 50 percent that at least two of them share a birthday. There were only 19 students in the classroom, so he said that the chance that two of them shared a birthday was quite small.

One boy said, “I’ll bet you a quarter that two of us here have the same birthday.”

Smullyan thought about that for a moment and said, “Oh, of course! You know the birthday of someone else here as well as your own!”

The boy said, “No, I give you my word that I don’t know the birthday of anyone here other than my own. Nevertheless I’ll bet you that there are two of us here who have the same birthday.”

Smullyan took the bet and lost. Why?

Click for Answer
| Puzzles

Illumination

https://www.maxpixel.net/Blue-Summer-Day-Clouds-White-Sky-Sunny-Sunny-Day-1117583

In a monastery cloisters on the edge of Venice is a sundial inscribed with the motto Horas non numero nisi serenas.

Literally that means “I don’t count the hours unless they are serene ones” (or “I count only the sunny hours”).

“But it really means, ‘When I come to die, the only moments that matter will have been the moments when I was at ease,'” writes Harry Mount in Amo, Amas, Amat and All That.

Of the motto, William Hazlitt wrote, “There is a softness and a harmony in the words and in the thought unparalleled.”

| Quotations

The Robben Island Notebooks

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kathrada_coons_crop.jpg

Sentenced in 1964 to life in prison, anti-apartheid activist Ahmed Kathrada got permission during his confinement to pursue a history degree through the University of South Africa. He used his access to books and writing materials to compile a series of secret notebooks in which he recorded quotations that inspired him. Together they form what used to be called a commonplace book — a series of personal memoranda that, taken together, illuminate the spirit of the compiler:

Ofttimes the test of courage becomes rather to live than to die. — Vittorio Alfieri

It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say he is one who never inflicts pain. — Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University Defined (1873)

One owes respect to the living; but to the dead one owes nothing but the truth. — Voltaire

The triumph of wicked men is always short-lived. — Honore de Balzac, The Black Sheep

(Form of oath-taking among Shoshone Indians is:) The earth hears me. The sun hears me. Shall I lie?

Conrad wrote that life sometimes made him feel like a cornered rat waiting to be clubbed.

Nobody knows what kind of government it is who has never been in prison. — Leo Tolstoy

Leve fit, quod bene fertur onus. (A burden becomes lightest when it is well borne.)

To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself. — Sun Tzu

Verba volant, scripta manent. (The spoken word flees; the written word remains.) — Ancient Roman adage

(Peter Ustinov explains why he reads so much:) “If you’re going to be the prisoner of your own mind, the least you can do is to make sure it’s well furnished.”

To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness. — Bertrand Russell

Altogether “Kathy” compiled seven notebooks over 26 years, drawing not just on his study materials and smuggled newspapers but on 5,000 books donated to the prison library by a Cape Town bookstore. Finally released in 1989, he went on to become a member of Parliament after South Africa’s first democratic elections in 1994 and served as President Nelson Mandela’s parliamentary counsellor until 1999.

One of his former warders, Christo Brand, told him, “I was supposed to be your master, but instead you became my mentor.”

(Sahm Venter, ed., Ahmed Kathrada’s Notebook From Robben Island, 2005.)

| History · Quotations · Society

Early Days

In her 1914 book Una Mary: The Inner Life of a Child, Una Hunt, the daughter of geologist Frank Wigglesworth Clarke, set out to describe the subjective world of her young girlhood. Here’s an example — she had created an imaginary land she called My Country in which her alternate self, Una Mary, lived, and then established it in the Persian rug in the parlor, where her chessmen could play out their adventures:

A very yellow palm-leaf in one corner of the pattern was the Holy Land. I thought it was holey, full of holes. I had simply heard some one speak of having been there the winter before, and the name sounded sunny and yellow, a cheerful sort of place, full of caves in the soft rock. I thought the whole country must look rather like Swiss cheese to deserve its name. The Holy Land was, of course, simply infested by robbers. The Forty Thieves lived there, each with a cave to himself, all in a row, and for some reason it was always there that we hid from pirates.

The outside border of the rug was the sea. I felt sure, of course, that the world was bounded by the sea and if you sailed to the edge the ship would fall off, so the chessmen were always careful not to go beyond the second stripe of the border outside. …

The stem of one flower was the Charles River, where I had found the turtle eggs, and another was The Amazon. Always that name has fascinated me, The Amazon, and I feel sure the river itself is a tawny orange zigzag with huge, many-colored leaves and flowers growing out of it at unexpected angles. It was like that on the rug, and I chose that particular stem to be The Amazon because its color was like the sound of the word. There was another reason besides the fascination of the name itself which later made me include it in the geography of My Country, and that was because Brazil was my only association with Royalty.

Psychologist G. Stanley Hall said, “I would rather have written it myself than to have made any study of childhood that has ever appeared.” The whole thing is here.

| Literature

Decalogue

Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules for good writing:

  1. Never open a book with weather.
  2. Avoid prologues.
  3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
  4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said.”
  5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
  6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
  7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
  8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
  9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
  10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

“My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

| Literature

Afield

Obscure words from Paul Hellweg’s Insomniac’s Dictionary, 1989:

tomecide: the destruction of a book

lampadomancy: augury by torch flame

shotclog: a drinking companion tolerated because he pays for the drinks

allonym: the name of a real person borrowed by an author

ephelides: freckles

feuterer: someone who keeps a dog

hypnopedia: the process of learning while asleep (e.g. by listening to a recording)

girouettism: the practice of frequently altering personal opinions to follow popular trends

panchreston: a broadly inclusive thesis that purports to cover all aspects of its subject but usually ends up as an unacceptable oversimplification

grangousier: one who will swallow anything

A few facetious Latinisms collected by Michael Quinion:

ferroequinologist: a railroad enthusiast (“one who studies the iron horse”)

infracaninophile: a lover of the underdog

anti-fogmatic: an alcoholic drink that counteracts the effects of fog

In 2014 a Futility Closet reader led me to elephantocetomachia, “a fight between an elephant and a whale,” a valuable word assembled from spare parts. And my notes say that vacansopapurosophobia means “fear of blank paper” — a useful expression, even if it’s not in the dictionary.

| Language

Sea Rules

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:General_History_of_the_Pyrates_-_Captain_Bartholomew_Roberts_with_two_Ships.jpg

Articles observed by the crew of Welsh pirate Bartholomew Roberts (1682-1722):

  1. Every man has a vote in affairs of moment; has equal title to the fresh provisions, or strong liquors, at any time seized, and may use them at pleasure, unless a scarcity makes it necessary, for the good of all, to vote a retrenchment.
  2. Every man to be called fairly in turn, by list, on board of prizes because, (over and above their proper share) they were on these occasions allowed a shift of clothes: but if they defrauded the company to the value of a dollar in plate, jewels, or money, marooning was their punishment.
  3. No person to game at cards or dice for money.
  4. The lights and candles to be put out at eight o’clock at night: if any of the crew, after that hour still remained inclined for drinking, they were to do it on the open deck.
  5. To keep their piece, pistols, and cutlass clean and fit for service.
  6. No boy or woman to be allowed amongst them. If any man were to be found seducing any of the latter sex, and carried her to sea, disguised, he was to suffer death.
  7. To desert the ship or their quarters in battle, was punished with death or marooning.
  8. No striking one another on board, but every man’s quarrels to be ended on shore, at sword and pistol.
  9. No man to talk of breaking up their way of living, till each had shared £1,000. If in order to do this, any man should lose a limb, or become a cripple in their service, he was to have 800 dollars, out of the public stock, and for lesser hurts, proportionately.
  10. The captain and quartermaster to receive two shares of a prize: the master, boatswain, and gunner, one share and a half, and other officers one and a quarter.
  11. The musicians to have rest on the Sabbath Day, but the other six days and nights, none without special favour.

That’s from Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Pyrates (1724), via naval historian David Cordingly’s Under the Black Flag (1995). In the early years of the 18th century, Cordingly writes, a pirate captain “had absolute power in battle and when ‘fighting, chasing, or being chased,’ but in all other matters he was governed by the majority wishes of the crew.”

| Crime · History

Limited Resources

In a 1993 segment on National Public Radio, Will Shortz challenged listeners to construct sentences that use only two consonants, such as “Can Connie, a nice niece in Canaan, can-can on a canoe in uncanny innocence?”

The winner, sent in by Dawne Bear and Rachel Chanin, was “See Tess taste-test Sissy’s sassy tea to attest to its tastiest status.” Other entries:

  • Beddy-bye, baby boy! Bid Daddy bye-bye! (Jim Hamilton)
  • Babs’ boss, Bobb, sobs as Bea’s base beau, Bubba, abuses sea bass. (Roxanne Bogucka)
  • A good guide dog did guide Dad. (Joe Cahill, Susan Morse)
  • Did dull addled Lady Della deal old ally, idle loaded Daddy Leo, a leaden dolly load o’ dilled eel? (Dorothy Thayer)
  • Dear Radio Reader: Did Eduardo, a rodeo rider, dare ride a rare red doe, or did Dario, a dour dude, roar “I rode a ruder, redder deer”? Adieu, Dierdre. (Bernell Scott)
  • At tea, a tattooed idiot did ode to a dead toad (a tad odd!). (Matt Hulen)
  • Otto, Thea! Out to the auto to toot to the heath! Tote the tot that hath the teeth to eat the hat! (Uh-oh, it hit Thea.) Aha, tie the hat to the tot! Ta-ta! (Bruce and Barbara Lessey)
  • Sally, a sassy lass, says “Susie is a souse — also loose”. Sly Susie says “I’ll sue!” (Aarne Hartikka)
  • A little tale to titillate — title: Lolita. (Toby Gottfried)
  • Name me: I am anyone, I am no one; I’m an anima, a meanie, a ninny, a mommy in a muumuu, a nun in a mini; I am many; I am one ­– I am Man. (Wayne Eastman)
  • At a roar in a ruin near our nunnery, I ran in a rare noon rain. (Nancy Gannon)
  • Sue supposes Pa possesses poise as Pa passes Sue pea soup. Sue, pious as a spouse, passes Pa pie. (Jay Cary)
  • “Wow,” we roar, “we are aware we wore wire a wry way. We’re a wee raw! We rue!” (Sylvia Coogan)

In presenting these in Word Ways the following May, editor Ross Eckler noted that “No one discovered that palindromes sometimes work: too hot to hoot; Madam, I’m Adam; name no one man.”

| Language

Observations

From the notebooks of Samuel Butler:

  • “When I was a boy at school at Shrewsbury, old Mrs. Brown used to keep a tray of spoiled tarts which she sold cheaper. They most of them looked pretty right till you handled them. We are all spoiled tarts.”
  • “Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.”
  • “They say the test of [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say ‘Can he name a kitten?’ And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.”
  • “The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable; absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullnesses of it and the pomposities of it.”
  • “When fatigued, I find it rests me to write very slowly with attention to the formation of each letter. I am often thus able to go on when I could not otherwise do so.”
  • “Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo, not for a man.”
  • “When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.”
  • “Life is one long process of getting tired.”
  • “I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other — I mean from the attempt to prolong family connection unduly and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so. The mischief among the lower classes is not so great, but among the middle and upper classes it is killing a large number daily. And the old people do not really like it much better than the young.”

“The true writer will stop everywhere and anywhere to put down his notes,” he wrote, “as the true painter will stop everywhere and anywhere to sketch.”

| Literature