Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Gary Nunn
In her recent book, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen, Mary Norris, who
writes for the New Yorker, does something groundbreaking with punctuation.
Exclamation marks, she writes controversially, are “a bit grim, even worrying”. The asterisks
used in swearwords (which you’ll find in most other news titles, but not the Guardian – its style
guide is proudly free of the priggish, prudish expletive-asterisk) are “little firecrackers inside the
words”. The superfluous hyphen, inserted by the copy editor, in Moby-Dick “stuck like a
harpoon in Melville’s famous title”. Semicolons are a form of over-educated punctuation:
“commas with vibrato”.
With this in mind, I thought I’d take her take her lead and bring some fun into punctuation. By
personifying it. This will, of course, negate our perceived need for emojis and they will become
redundant once this piece is published.
Far too refined, articulate and supercilious to resort to exclamation marks, he mansplains his
outrage using semicolons to indicate his intelligence and superiority. All his letters of complaint
are long and handwritten with fountain pen. Each complaint has three clauses and
justifications, which he lays out meticulously. He occasionally underlines for emphasis; but only
when absolutely necessary.
The square brackets are the pedants who just wish you’d speak with more clarity
Call them OCD if you want to, but they need to report what you said with clarity. And when you
didn’t say what they wanted you to say, or exactly how they expected you to say it, they get
picky. They insert [square] brackets, to differentiate from the pedestrian but curvy parenthesis,
to indicate that they’ve inserted this word on your behalf because you’ve clearly never learned
English properly and need all the help you can get, what?
The ellipsis is the person who can’t decide what they want for dinner when you’re at your
hangriest
You are hangry (hungry-angry) and surely your friend can see that. But they still proceed with
all the options – well there’s Mexican … or next door there’s pizza … down the road there’s
Indian … or around the corner is Chine … ANYWHERE! ANYWHERE! Is all you can scream. So,
you finally settle on the Chinese. When the waiter comes to take the order, they can’t decide if
they want chicken … or beef … or special fried rice … or ….
The double quotation marks: the most sarcastic sod you know
Because every time they want to be “helpful”, they just do that annoying “bunny ear”
gesticulation with their fingers to air-quote the word that makes them oh-so-sarcy and oh-so-
irritating. Very “clever”.