How punctilious can one be by overusing so-called signs of punctuation? Are
all, as Witters suggest, 'otiose'? (vide "The Brown Book"). Did the Ten
Commandments read, "Thou shalt not kill", or "Thou shalt not kill!"? (vide
"The Dead-Sea Scrolls").
Or should it be the 'implicatures'? Unlike Popper (for whom there is ONE
SCIENCE, for Grice there are MANY implicatures -- and more).
In a message dated 7/14/2015 12:12:33 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
jejunejesuit.geary2@xxxxxxxxx writes:
"I'll never foreverget my second-grade teacher who told us a thousand
times, "PUNCTUATIOUSNESS LEADS TO PUNCTILIOSITY!!!!"
"A thousand times" is not hyperbolic. An academic year consists of a finite
number of days (barring Saturdays and Sundays, and the summer holidays,
and the other holidays). So the ratio would be that the teacher said it more
or less how many times a class? That's a question for Goedel.
In Arabic, "thousand" needs, merely, 'many', as in "The book of the
thousand nights and one night".
Geary continues:
"She did not cotton to punctuation marks. She called them crutches and
would mark us down if we used any punctuation marks at all."
And right she was too. The keyword, or hashtag, is #punctiliosity.
Chaucer never was puctilious, nor was Shakespeare. The first citation in
English of 'punctilious' is from 1630, from a well-known punctilious diarist
("Dear Diary,"). She possibly (but then possibly not) borrowed from the
Italian "puntiglioso" (but she never was in Italy), which comes from from a
"puntiglio", i.e. a "fine point," ultimately as used by Cicero, "punctum" a
"prick". Writing punctiliously leads to punctiliousness, indeed.
Geary goes on:
"She said that there was only one kind of language and that was spoken
language."
Again quoting from the second-grade teacher:
"You don't make punctuation sounds when you speak, so don't use the damn
things when you write," she would shout red in the face."
The so-called 'clicks' that some languages uses are like 'pricks' or
Cicero's 'puncta', but, and Anderson Cooper (on CNN -- he is Gloria
Vanderbilt's
son, but this he might have borrowed from his father) always makes the
'quote' marks with both his hands, when he reads a piece of news, "quote" and
"unquote". He thinks it's cute!
The second-grade teacher went on, Geary notes:
""If your audience is too stupid to understand straight out speech then the
hell with them," she screamed punctuationishly."
The hashtag is #dumbdown -- and the conversational maxim by Grice is "do
not dumb down your addressee" (He prefers 'addressee' to 'audience').
Geary goes on:
"She would amuse us half the day damning punctuation, callling it the
Devil's spawn. Poor woman -- we all assumed she was a woman, couldn't tell
for
sure what with all that cloth wrapped around her from the top of her head
to the soles of her shoes and always, always, always wearing a black dress
that did not flatter her at all. "Neverthenonetheless," she would say, as
if anything mattered."
One problem with gender identity ("Am I a woman?", "Am I a man?") is that
while 'he' and 'she' are used in the THIRD person only, there is only one
first-person personal pronoun, "I", which indeed, leaves the audience to
just ASSUME things.
On the other hands, e e cummings never used punctuation either. The hashtag
here is #punctuation in #poetry.
Cheers,
Speranza
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