Granta magazine has an online series, Mark Up, for which they “invited writers to tell us their thoughts on punctuation and grammar”; so far, though, the only one that seems to fall under “grammar” is a cranky rant about the verb “to gift” by Christian Lorentzen, who sounds like a nonagenarian even though he looks considerably younger, I’m going to focus on the others, which are far more interesting: Harriet Armstrong on what we really mean when we punctuate our text messages with ‘lol’, Madeline Cash on her mother’s use of ellipses, Will Harris on Alice Notley’s ‘wrong’ quotation marks, Maggie Millner on pauses, silences and choosing where to end the line, Grace Byron on the question mark, Rebecca Perry on parentheses, Akshi Singh on X (to indicate a kiss), and Adam Mars-Jones on lesser-known punctuations marks (¶, ç, ⁁). I suppose it’s worth saying that these essays are not the work of linguists and doubtless contain statements that will not pass muster to the eagle eye of a specialist, but I like this sort of thing. I particularly enjoyed the Will Harris piece, which begins:
The first thing you notice when you open Alice Notley’s epic poem The Descent of Alette is the quotation marks: there are lots of them and they’re in all the wrong places. This is how it starts:
‘One day, I awoke’ ‘& found myself on’ ‘a subway, endlessly’
‘I didn’t know’ ‘how I’d arrived there or’ ‘who I was’ ‘exactly’
‘But I knew the train’ ‘knew riding it’ ‘knew the look of’
‘those about me’
It’s clear that quotation marks are not being used here in ordinary ways – to indicate either direct speech or quotation from another text. Perhaps they’re performing another of their main roles: to point out a received idea, suggesting the author’s knowledge (and disavowal) of a choice of words – this is a ‘classic’ usage. Reading Alette, you sense Notley weighing up each phrase in this way, inspecting every word through the wry spectacles of quotation.
a cranky rant about the verb “to gift” by Christian Lorentzen
Oh my, yes .. an embarrassment.
“In any context the transitive ‘gift’ or ‘gifted’ is used, a simple ‘give’ or ‘gave’ will do.”
Evidently no feeling for the nuances of English. “I gifted him a book” is not at all synonymous with “I gave him a book.”
Also, he clearly does not know what “transitive” means. (But then, people of this kind decry the “passive voice” without actually being able to identify it.)
Actually, he perhaps (surely?) does know what “transitive” means, if he thinks for a bit, but is unable to specify exactly what usage he is objecting to: he may be thinking of a contrast with “gifted”, as in “a gifted child”, but he lacks enough knowledge of, or interest in, English grammar to explain wherein the difference actually lies.
He probably just felt that throwing in a technical grammar term randomly made him sound more like a “buff with some rudimentary training” than a “crank.”
I once copy-edited some transcribed interviews. The most challenging part was adding commas, which the transcriber had had no use for at all. I learned then just how much of an art commatizing can be, not expressible by any facile rules. You can’t stop paying attention to syntax and to intonation. Put in too many commas, and it looks like a written text, not a spoken one. Too few, and the reader is lost. Once you’ve achieved a balance consistent with what you think the speaker should sound like to the reader, you need to maintain it consistently for the rest of the interview. Unless the tone and the tempo have changed…
I wouldn’t say I got to be an expert at it, but I at least got to see how difficult it was.
Mr. Mars-Jones’s “parapunctuation” conceit makes my head hurt.