The Rise of the “Oxford Comma“

A weekend Twitter conversation with editor Harold Underdown and picture book creator Debbie Ridpath Ohi set me digging for the origin of the phrase Oxford comma.”

That’s the currently popular term for the comma before “and” or “or” in a series of three or more, as in “Tom, Dick, or Harry.” The more established term is “serial comma.” Some people are trained to use that comma, others not to.

Punctuation in the eighteenth century was haphazard to the point of being hazardous. In contrast, the Victorians were prescriptivists, and the spread of print culture meant there was a lot to prescribe.

Around the turn of the twentieth century Horace Hart (1840-1916), controller of the Oxford University Press, issued a set of guidelines for that organization’s type compositors and proof readers. His examples show he expected to see the serial comma, but he never pointed it out or prescribed it.

Around the same time, the polymath Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) wrote to F. Howard Collins (1857-1910) about why the serial comma mattered, stating:

whether to write “black, white, and green,” with the comma after white, or to leave out the comma and write “black, white and green”—I very positively decide in favour of the first. To me the comma is of value as marking out the component elements of a thought, and where any set of components of a thought are of equal value, they should be punctuated in printing and in speech equally: Evidently therefore in this case, inasmuch as when enumerating these colours black, white, and green, the white is just as much to be emphasized as the other two, it needs the pause after it just as much as the black does.

Collins quoted Spencer in a footnote of his 1905 book Author and Printer: A Guide for Authors, Editors, Printers, Correctors of the Press, Compositors, and Typists. Collins wrote that book in part because he felt Hart’s guide didn’t have enough practical advice for authors.

The Inland Printer magazine, published in Chicago, quoted Collins’s footnote in a review of recent references for compositors. By the end of 1905, therefore, Spencer’s argument for serial commas was spreading on both sides of the Atlantic. For decades the serial comma has been a standard put forward by The Chicago Manual of Style, the main style guide of the American book publishing industry.

However, some areas of publishing resisted that rule. One was daily newspaper journalism in the US. A serial comma might be little more than a flyspeck, but if we total up all such commas in a week of newspapers, eliminating it might save a significant amount of ink, paper, and time. For decades, therefore, The Associated Press Stylebook has prescribed not using the serial comma unless it was necessary to avoid confusion.

Americans in different fields can thus train themselves either to use the serial comma or not to, in the firm belief that they’re following the most authoritative writing guide. It’s all a matter of which sort of writing they’ve undertaken.

Meanwhile, after World War 2 Britain went through a great punctuation contraction. I’ve written about this before. Double-quote marks became single-quote marks. Periods disappeared from many abbreviations. Newspapers stopped setting off titles with italics or quote marks. And the serial comma was shooed away.

Except at Oxford University Press. As at the University of Chicago Press, scholarly editors continued to see value in the clarity of the serial comma. Posthumously expanded editions of Horace Hart’s rules made that mark of punctuation a standard even as much of British publishing disagreed.

Because the serial comma had become a hallmark of the Oxford University Press, Peter Sutcliffe dubbed it the “Oxford comma” in his 1978 history of the publisher. He credited Collins with establishing the rule, but his own book established a new term for the mark.

“Oxford comma” is thus a retronym, a term coined for something that was once so standard it didn’t need a special designation (e.g., analog watch, prose novel). At one point all British publishers put commas into series of three or more. Now that most don’t, that comma is notable enough to need a name, and “Oxford comma” has a touch of class. It’s quite possible that “serial comma” is also a retronym, forced by journalism developing a different standard.

Harold and I agreed that “Oxford comma” seems like a parvenu synonym for what we’d learned as the “serial comma.” Indeed, Google Books Ngram confirms that authors used “serial comma” and “series comma” starting around 1920. For a long time the terms appeared at about the same rate, but “serial comma” took off in the late 1970s.

Not until this century did “Oxford comma” spread, perhaps pushed by international internet debate. In the Google Books Ngram database (which stops in 2008), “Oxford comma” has overtaken “series comma” and cut into the dominance of “serial comma.” It has not, however, returned to being standard punctuation in Britain.

Quote Unquote

In an article for Slate, Andrew Heisel probed the growth of an unorthodox use of single-quote marks:

For several years now in teaching writing classes to college freshmen, I’ve noticed some students adopt another rule: double quotes for long quotations, single quotes for single words or short phrases. They’ll quote a long passage from Measure for Measure accurately, but when they want to quote one of Shakespeare’s words, a cliché, or some dubious concept like “virtue,” they’ll go with single quotes.

It took me a while to understand what was going on, but after thoroughly studying it I developed a rigorous explanation for this staggering decline in standards: kids today.

But then Heisel began to see that same pattern in colleagues’ writing. In news stories. Online. In 2008 I reported the single-quote style’s appearance in novels by Madeleine L’Engle and Scott Turow going back to 1973.

And yet it remained unsanctioned by any modern authorities. For a while Wikipedia said, “some style guides specify single quotation marks for this usage, and double quotation marks for verbatim speech.” Heisel looked at “38 different style and usage manuals” and didn’t find one that stated that as a rule. A handful acknowledged it as an occasional practice, especially in abstruse disciplines that deal with language. Most experts still looked askance at the style.

But Heisel also found—online, not in a library—The King’s English, published in multiple editions a century ago by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler. After establishing the use of double-quote marks for quotations, that book states: “Some of those who follow this system also use the single marks for isolated words, short phrases, and anything that can hardly be called a formal quotation; this avoids giving much emphasis to such expressions, which is an advantage.”

Heisel quotes Harvard English professor Marjorie Garber as noting that quote marks can signal opposing meanings: “both absolute authenticity and veracity…and suspected inauthenticity, irony or doubt.” In the second group I also see writers including things characters generally feel or say or have said, but not necessarily in those exact words at a specified time, and thus not as a verifiable direct quotation.

The pattern raises some questions:

• Is the usage different in modern Britain, where since the postwar punctuation shortage most books use single-quotes for direct quotations?
• Is there enough value in distinguishing between those two types of quotations—direct and sort-of—for this usage to become useful and eventually standard?
• Since the practice seems fairly widespread despite the apparent lack of any authority requiring or even suggesting it since the Fowlers a century ago, do writers gravitate toward this use of single-quotes because it seems logical or natural?

Balloonacy at the B.C.R.

This evening the Boston Comics Roundtable did an activity I invented called Balloonacy. It didn’t pan out exactly as I’d imagined since we’d talked so long about how to make the group more active that there wasn’t as much time left for an actual activity. But I think it was fun and productive for those involved.

I started by drawing the classic ellipsoid balloon with a short pointy tail and the letters “B.C.R.” inside. I posited that that’s the comics equivalent of a sentence with a period at the end. It’s a straightforward statement.

Then I challenged folks to draw balloons in which the lettering, punctuation or other marks inside the balloon, balloon shape, tail shape, or some other visual detail would give the letters “B.C.R.” a different meaning and perhaps sound.

The group then drew (in no particular order):

• classic thought balloon.
• dotted whisper balloon.
• balloon with four tails, for four (or more) people speaking simultaneously.
• balloon with nine tails over a cityscape to signal a chorus of millions.
• collage of balloons all saying the same thing.
• fancy letters for ornate speech.
• The Yellow Kid with a message on his nightshirt.
• balloon shaped like a luscious pair of lips.
• burst balloon for shouting.
• scroll-shaped balloon with blackletter/Gothic letters for a town crier.
• three connected balloons each containing one letter for a single, slow, deliberate speaker.
• three separate balloons each containing one letter pointing to a single depressed figure.
• three separated balloons each containing one letter with tails pointing different places to denote three speakers.
• balloon with tail going off the page to an off-panel speaker.
• block letters and block balloon for a carnival barker.
• two forms of white letters dropped out of a black balloon, one with the wavery white border that Todd Klein gave to Dream in Sandman. (We also looked at his Delirium balloons.)
• wavery letters for a spooky voice.
• icicle-dripping balloon for disdain.
• two variations of rebuses spelling out “B.C.R.,” one assigned to a mime.
• balloon with a long, meandering tail suitable for a character who talks and talks without getting to the point.
• balloon containing musical notes as well as letters for singing.
• letters strung out on an undulating musical staff for more singing.
• wavery-bordered balloon with its tail dropping off the bottom of the page where the speaker is collapsing in a faint.
• two balloons, one overlapping the other to show an interruption.
• balloon blocked by the side of a panel as something interrupts.
• vertical balloon containing Japanese kanji sounding approximately like “B.C.R.” 
• huge letters from a loud character flattening other characters.
• tiny, lowercase letters within a big balloon for quiet speech.
• two examples of giant block letters crowding the edges of their balloon.
• square block letters in a squarish balloon for a real square.
• letters drawn within concentric radio waves spreading from an antenna.
• jagged-edged balloon and with a lightning-bolt tail to denote electronic communication.
• big block letters with small exclamation points instead of periods—verging on a sound effect!
• round balloon with no tail for a disembodied or off-panel speaker.
• squarish balloon and lettering for a robot.
• balloon with its tail ending in a starburst against a window—a recent way of showing that someone is speaking inside that building.
• various typographical symbols before the letters to indicate profanity.
• chevrons on either side of the letters and an asterisked footnote to indicate speech in a foreign language (or, some people thought, HTML).
• tailless thought balloon broken up with breath marks to denote psychic communication.
• a long, boring speech wallpapered on the back of a panel.

We also came up with three balloons that not everyone agreed on how to interpret.

• thought balloon with a pointed tail instead of the trail of puffs that thought balloons usually have. Could this indicate thinking aloud?
• three numbered boxes each containing one letter. I didn’t catch the discussion on that one.
• balloon butted up against the edge of a panel. That usually means the same thing as a balloon fully inside a panel—it doesn’t seem to reflect anything more than the available space and the preference of the editor and letterer who place that balloon. But perhaps it could have storytelling significance. Say, one dominant character’s speech balloons are always in the center of a panel and another’s are always crowded to one side.
• word balloon in the shape of a real helium balloon with a knot at the bottom. What might this symbolize?

And that was just balloons. We haven’t yet talked about other ways comics show the invisible.

Networks Toying With Us?

In the latest “Fat Man on Batman” podcast, writer Paul Dini spoke candidly about recent trends in superhero cartoons on television (as transcribed by Vi):

There’s been…a sudden trend in animation, with super-heroes. Like, “It’s too old. It’s too old for our audience, and it has to be younger. It has to be funnier.” And that’s when I watch the first couple of episodes of Teen Titans Go!, it’s like those are the wacky moments in the Teen Titans cartoon, without any of the more serious moments. “Let’s just do them all fighting over pizza, or running around crazy and everything, ’cause our audience—the audience we wanna go after, is not the Young Justice audience any more. We wanna go after little kids, who are into—boys who are into goofy humor, goofy random humor, like on Adventure Time or Regular Show. We wanna do that goofy, that sense of humor, that’s where we’re going for.” . . .

They’re all for boys. “We do not want the girls.” I mean, I’ve heard executives say this…, saying like, “We do not want girls watching this show.” . . . They. Do. Not. Buy. Toys. The girls buy different toys. . . .

I’ll just lay it on the line: that’s the thing that got us cancelled on Tower Prep, honest-to-God was, like, “We need boys, but we need girls right there, right one step behind the boys”—this is the network talking—“one step behind the boys, not as smart as the boys, not as interesting as the boys, but right there.” And then we began writing stories that got into the two girls’ back stories, and they were really interesting. And suddenly we had families and girls watching, and girls really became a big part of our audience, in sort of like they picked up that Harry Potter type of serialized way. . . . But, the Cartoon Network was saying, “Fuck, no, we want the boys.” Action, it’s boys’ action, this goofy boy humor we’ve gotta get that in there. . . . And I’d say, but look at the numbers, we’ve got parents watching, with the families, and then when you break it down—“Yeah,…we’ve got too many girls. We need more boys.” . . .

And then that’s why they cancelled us, and they put on a show called Level Up, which is, you know, goofy nerds fighting CG monsters. It’s like, “We don’t want the girls because the girls won’t buy toys. . . . Boys, boys, boys. Boys buy the little spinny tops, they buy the action figures, girls buy princesses, we’re not selling princesses.”

In fact, we already knew this.

Back in 2010, as Young Justice was launching on the Cartoon Network, co-creator Greg Weisman said:

I think, from an economic standpoint, we have to hit boys 6 – 14 for Cartoon Network to sell their ad space or whatever, so if you think of it as a bull’s eye with concentric circles, that’s the bull’s eye we have to hit.

I quoted that back here. Weisman and his fellow creators wanted to do more than that, and they created a fine show that appealed to a wider set of viewers. In fact, it did all the things that Dini just said the Cartoon Network didn’t appreciate. The mood was generally serious instead of goofy. There were lots of female characters and relationships. The story was serialized. And in the second season, the story became even more complex, with more adult themes.

When Young Justice wasn’t renewed after two seasons, Rich Johnston at Bleeding Cool declared amid comma splices that the decision was “down to lower toy sales than expected.” As Weisman told the Denver Comic-Con, merchandise sales can make up a large part of the revenue for a show for the Warner Bros. A surplus of Green Lantern merchandise was a factor in the simultaneous cancellation of the Green Lantern animated show.

But in fact the Young Justice toy line was cancelled in April 2012, weeks before the second season launched. Production on that season continued through October, and the show itself ran until March 2013. Though the lack of toy revenue would have affected the larger corporation’s calculations about the show (both Warner Bros. and the Cartoon Network are part of what’s still for the moment called Time Warner), the show still had the chance to pull in an audience.

But that had to be the right sort of audience. As viewers of commercial television, we always have to remember that networks don’t make their money by providing us with entertainment. Their business is to supply their advertisers with our attention. And if those advertisers want the delivery of males aged six to fourteen, because that’s who will ask for their products, a larger audience of other eyeballs isn’t going to offer them much more value. In this era of “narrow-casting,” basic cable channels and Saturday-morning cartoons all have niche audiences to deliver.

“Add a Manicule in the Margin,” Tom Said Pointedly.

I read a couple of interesting extracts from Keith Houston’s new book on typography, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks, including an article on the history of the “manicule”: the pointing hand drawing readers’ attention to a particular line or passage.

Created by medieval scribes, that symbol was reproduced by early printers. The presence of the pointing hand in many early sets of lead type justifies Houston’s decision to treat it as a form of standard punctuation. Web-browser programmers adapted or reinvented it for designating hyperlinks as one moves a computer cursor over that part of the screen.

But what’s the standard term for the pointing hand? Houston uses the Latinate word “manicule,” which carries an air of antiquity. However, Michael Quinion reports in World Wide Words:

The history of manicule in English is a bit of a mystery. It isn’t recorded in the recent review of the letter M in the Oxford English Dictionary, nor is it in any other dictionary I’ve been able to consult. And I’ve found no example in print before 1996. However, William Sherman wrote in a detailed study of the sign in 2005 that he had been told it had become the standard term among scholars who study ancient manuscripts. I wonder if his informant actually had manicula in mind, either the Latin word or the identical Italian one; this has certainly been used in English-language works on manuscripts. Alteration of the final letter to turn it into an English equivalent seems to have happened very recently.

William H. Sherman’s essay was titled “Toward a History of the Manicule” (PDF download), and it became part of his 2009 book Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Sherman noted a host of terms for the symbol:

I have now found 15 other names for what I prefer to follow the manuscript specialists in calling the manicule: hand, pointing hand, hand director, pointer, digit, fist, mutton fist, bishop’s fist, index, indicationum, indicator, indicule, maniple, and pilcrow. The last three terms are outright mistakes: indicule and maniple are mishearings, misrememberings, or conflations of similar words.

(Houston’s book also has a long discussion of the pilcrow, which is this: ¶.)

The official, and long-established, English term for the pointing hand is “index.” However, we use that word for other things in designing books today, so perhaps we should adopt “manicule” and pretend it’s much older than what the evidence points to.

What Fell Out of 52 Pickup

It was a warm, clear day when I heard that crime novelist Elmore Leonard had died after well over eighty years and forty books. That news reminded me that I’d been meaning to write about the experience of recently reading one of his novels—52 Pickup, to be exact—in digital form.

Like many caper novelists, Leonard wrote lots of short scenes and jumped from one point of view to another as needed. When one of those shifts occurred within a chapter, his print publisher followed the usual format of leaving extra space between the end of one section and the start of another. If those blank areas wound up at the bottom or top of a typeset page, the publisher hauled out the simple • dingbat to alert readers to the otherwise hard-to-spot section break. 

Typesetting conventions for ebooks are different, however. Most notably, the standard ebook format follows most web pages (including this one) by putting an extra line space between paragraphs and not indenting the first line of each new paragraph. 

In converting 52 Pickup to its digital format, HarperCollins ebooks reformatted the paragraphs: no indent, extra space in between. But it also wiped out the extra spaces between one section and the next. If there was a dingbat on the printed page, the • also appeared in the digital form, but most shifts from one point of view and scene to another come with no such signal for readers. That meant Leonard’s transitions, originally smooth, were bumpy, requiring me to notice the shift, stop, and look back to confirm when it happened.

The copyright page of the 52 Pickup ebook says it was converted in 2002. I hope the process has grown more sophisticated since, but then I’d hope it would have been applied to older books. It’s an easy fix, and Leonard and his readers deserve better. 

A Real Reason to Boycott

Facing criticism from fans for hiring Orson Scott Card, an outspoken opponent of homosexuality and marriage equality, to write a Superman story, DC Comics issued this statement:

As content creators we steadfastly support freedom of expression, however the personal views of individuals associated with DC Comics are just that - personal views - and not those of the company itself.

Questions of free speech, political acceptability, and the free market are one thing. But splicing independent clauses with the word “however”—that’s intolerable.

My Authority Record

Last week I received a nice note from a university library:

I’m cataloging your George Washington's headquarters and home. I wish to create an authority record for your name to distinguish it from the other J. L. Bells in our catalog. Would you be willing to provide me with some piece of personal information, such as a birth year (preferably), or what your initials J.L. stand for?

Thank you for considering this odd request.

I was already familiar with that system because it came up when I published my first book nearly twenty years ago. The cataloguing-in-publication system doesn’t like the semi-anonymity of author initials.

I replied:

Thanks for your email. I was born in 1965. I might show up in your system already as the author of SOAP SCIENCE. Yes, that's me.

That’s a collection of science experiments for kids aged 8 to 12 originally published by Kids Can Press.

And the cataloguer replied:

Thanks so much for your reply! Yes, your name has already be set up as “Bell, J. L. (John Leonard), 1965-” . I made the guess that you were not the same person as the author of Soap science, so this information is very much appreciated. I will add the George Washington info to your authority record.

It wasn’t the request that was unusual, you see; it’s my writing output.

I noticed that the cataloguer formats all book titles in the library way, with capital letters only at the start and for proper nouns. How cute.

Anyway, I now have an expanded authority record.

No Climbdown from Baum on “Climb Down”

I started this series of postings with a quotation from L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, with Dorothy admonishing a horse about how to talk properly:

“She couldn’t climb down, Jim,” said Dorothy. “To climb means to go up.”

“Who said so?” demanded the horse.

“My school-teacher said so; and she knows a lot, Jim.”

“To ‘climb down’ is sometimes used as a figure of speech,” remarked the Wizard.

“Well, this was a figure of a cat,” said Jim, “and she went down, anyhow, whether she climbed or crept.”

Soon afterward the horse tells another character, “You may go down, but you can only climb up.” But Jim does so “with a twinkle in his round eyes.” Evidently he still thinks this rule is silly.

And did Baum himself accept the proscription against “climb down”? A search through his books shows that he definitely didn’t.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz uses five variations on the phrase “climb down.” Baum’s other fantasy for 1900, The Magical Monarch of Mo, uses three. That was the same year that The Inland Printer, a Chicago trade magazine that Baum knew well, advised against the phrase.

In The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902), the title character “climbs down” chimneys five times. Other Baum novels that contain the phrase include Ozma of Oz (once), Rinkitink in Oz (twice), Sky Island (twice), and The Magic of Oz (three times). Those titles nearly cover the breadth of Baum’s novel-writing career.

In having Dorothy correct Jim’s grammar, Baum was probably just setting up a joke. But that scene also showed Dorothy’s somewhat bossy side (evident in other conversations in other books), and added to illustrator John R. Neill’s gentrification of a plain Kansas farmgirl. Despite her elided words, she was becoming more snooty about language than her creator.

Baum and The Inland Printer

In the 1890s L. Frank Baum and his family moved to Chicago. He supported them as a freelance journalist and traveling salesman before parlaying his (brief and unsuccessful) experience as a shopkeeper in Aberdeen, South Dakota, into a job editing The Show Window.

In 1900 a Chicago-based trade magazine called The Inland Printer described Baum’s magazine in a squib that might have been supplied by the editor himself:

The Show Window, edited by L. Frank Baum, Chicago, is growing in interest from month to month. It is the official organ of the National Association of Window Trimmers of America, and contains an amount of information in this line to be had through no other source. Its half-tone illustrations of window display are worth more than the price of the publication. No storekeeper can afford to be without such a magazine. Its suggestions for Easter window decorations in the special Easter number are a treat to even the uninitiated.

By then Baum also had a second career as a children’s author. The Inland Printer noted that as well a few issues later:

The author of “Father Goose,” Mr. L. Frank Baum, has followed up his success with a remarkable juvenile entitled “A New Wonderland,” which is shortly to be issued by R. H. Russell, of New York. The reader is introduced to a marvelous and hitherto undiscovered country, peopled with the quaintest and merriest characters ever conceived to delight childish hearts. Frank Ver Beck has made many colored pictures for the new book, which bids fair to attain a popularity seldom accorded a juvenile publication.

That book is better known now under its reissue title, The Magical Monarch of Mo.

The Inland Printer didn’t take note of Baum’s other fantasy for children published in 1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. However, that year’s volume did feature illustrations from W. W. Denslow, including the spooky “What’s the Use?” and three bookplates for the Wilkins family (two reproduced here via Google Books, and thus at less than optimum crispness).

So we know Baum was almost certainly reading The Inland Printer, and probably contributing to it. Which gives more significance to another item from the 1900 volume, a response to a reader’s proofreading inquiry on whether “climb up” was incorrect.

The Inland Printer’s editors said the word “up” was unnecessary and noted other common phrases that were equally redundant. The column added:

No dictionary except one even mentions the phrase “climb down,” and that one, the Funk & Wagnalls Standard, says that it is a United States colloquialism.

Thus, when Baum had Dorothy Gale pass on a lesson from her teacher not to say “climb down,” he was echoing advice he’d probably read a few years before.

TOMORROW: But did that usage bother Baum?

The Pushback against “Climb Down”

As L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz suggests in the passage I quoted yesterday, there were people in America around the turn of the last century saying that the phrase “climb down” was incorrect. The logical problem was that “climb” implies going up. The real problem, most likely, is that the phrase had been identified as American, rather than proper, English.

Scholars of the language noted the idiom “climb down” as early as 1872, when Maximilian Schele de Vere wrote in Americanisms: The English of the New World:

Climb, to, is occasionally used in the extraordinary sense of climbing down, as in the account of the Rev. H. W. Beecher:— “I partly climbed down, and partly clambered back again, satisfied that it was easier to get myself in than to get the flowers out.” (Star Papers, p. 41.)

John S. Farmer echoed that in Americanisms, Old & New, published in 1889:

Climb-down, To.—A perversion of words to signify downward motion; to descend; comedown. Commonly colloquial.

Farmer’s Slang and Its Analogues from 1891 was a little more accepting, calling the phrase “At first American” and citing some usages.

Henry Frederic Reddall’s Fact, Fancy, and Fable, published in Chicago in 1892, listed:

Climb. In England this word is always used in the sense “to mount, to rise, to ascend.” In America, people climb down. Rev. H. W. Beecher, who may be considered a competent judge of correct English, in describing his visit to Oxford, says, “To climb down the wall was easy enough.”

The 1908 edition of the Fowlers’ The King’s English, published in Oxford in the same year as Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, took note of “climb down” as a slang term, but had nothing more to say about it.

The Google Ngram Viewer suggests that in the late nineteenth century the phrase became increasingly popular. But that also produced a backlash.

Most prominent among American prescriptivists, Ambrose Bierce (shown above) included “Climb down” in Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults, published in 1909. He snapped: “In climbing one ascends.” And in The Correct Word, How to Use It, first published in 1915, Josephine Turck Baker wrote:

Climb indicates ascension; in consequence, “climb down” is censured. There seems, however, to be no good substitute for “climb down.”

Which was, really, Jim the cab-horse’s point.

COMING UP: Linking this dispute to Baum.

Our Anachronistic Equine Vocabulary

There’s no Y in “linchpin.” Lots of people have taken to spelling the word with a Y in place of the first I because we hardly ever see linchpins. Those used to be very important because they held wheels onto the axles of wagons. I guess people are more used to seeing variations on the word “lynching.”

There’s no G in “free rein” or “tight rein” or “to rein in someone.” Those are metaphors derived from a horse’s reins, but people now seem to interpret them as related to a monarch’s reign and add the G. That’s what linguists have lately taken to calling eggcorns, attempts to make better sense of a word when folks don’t know its original derivation or context.

Those terms have become unfamiliar because they grew out of a horse-based economy. We no longer have the daily context to remind us of their original usage and meaning.

Similarly, people are now saying they’re “straddled with” problems instead of “saddled with” them because horse saddles are no longer part of our lives. People wonder what “riding roughshot” means because we no longer have to wonder about having a horse “roughshod”; that refers to horses shoed with the nailheads sticking out a little for extra traction, and I had to look it up myself. “Souped up” started as racing-track slang; now some people are using “suped up,” probably inspired by Superman.

Our language has lots of terms derived from the horse-based economy. Some are obvious (looking a gift horse in the mouth), others less so (long in the tooth), and some on their way out through obscurity (kick over the traces).

Those phrases survive like the traces of our physical equine infrastructure. In the center of my home town there’s a flower planter at the ideal height for a horse—because it was originally a fountain where drivers and riders could water their animals. But most of the unneeded parts of that infrastructure—small ponds, hitching-posts, stables, ferriers’ shops—have disappeared, swept away like manure from the streets.

As technological change has sped up, we’re probably making once-familiar phrases into anachronisms faster than ever. Kids today have never touched a telephone or television “dial.” A friend told me about having to explain to a college student what “drop a dime” meant. When I was a lad, an “E ticket” meant you could go on the very best rides at Disneyland; now it’s what I don’t bring to the airport. Soon people may be interpreting “champing at the bit” to refer to data.

TOMORROW: The carrot and the stick.

(Image above from the Boston Public Library’s Flickr stream.)

Amelia's Path to Publishing Success

Publishers Weekly featured Brigid Alverson’s profile of Jimmy Gownley, writer, artist, and for a time publisher of the Amelia Rules comics series.

Gownley started out self-publishing in magazine form, improvised a paperback collection (his printing partner “shaved the staples of the single issues and bound them together”), worked with packager Byron Preiss, and went back to self-publishing after Preiss’s sudden death. Some efforts were surprisingly successful, some failures. And that was just the first five years.

Then came the biggest challenge yet—the fruits of unusual success. Alverson reports:

Getting Amelia into the Scholastic book fairs, which was nearly unheard of for a self-published book, was another important step; the best-of anthology that Gownley produced for Scholastic sold 83,000 copies. But with bigger sales came bigger headaches. Big book orders can completely paralyze small publishers who may not have the man power to deliver the order on time. "Six months or so after the Scholastic deal, when we could sell that book ourselves, we got an order for 4,000 copies," Gownley said. "My father helped [get the order fulfilled], and he was really sweating, and I said, 'Can you imagine how strong J. K. Rowling must be?'"

Finally in 2008 Gownley signed an eight-book deal with Simon & Schuster. That arrangement meant Gownley could focus on content rather than production and distribution. Another benefit, as I noted back here, was more support with proofreading, which I can’t help but think meant that the books got into more school libraries.

With the end of his S&S contract, the article reveals, Gownley is moving on to new projects. It’s too bad that there won’t be more Amelia, but she has been growing up, little by little.

“Characters were constantly speaking to themselves out loud”

At a new blog called Comics Without Frontiers, Miguel Rosa traces the development of thought balloons in the first year of Superman and Spirit comics.

[Rosa started his blog to promote discussion of comics from outside the US, but a lot of the postings are on the standard American superhero stories. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.]

This posting complements my discussion of the same topic, which watched how thought balloons developed alongside whisper balloons since early on characters often seemed to be voicing asides to the audience.

Rosa writes:

I realized that one of the reasons why thought balloons were seldom used in those years was because the characters were constantly speaking to themselves out loud, like in this panel from Action Comics #1. In many of these cases, thought balloons should have been used instead. Rather than speaking out loud, a thought balloon containing a line like, “The cops are coming; I better change to my civilian clothes!” would make more sense.

He also reprints a delightful Spirit panel which shows the hero trapped under water and saying out loud: “I...can’t... hold...my...breath... much...longer!”

Soon, however, the thought balloon became a standard part of American comics punctuation, avoiding such unrealistic moments. Because superhero comics had to be realistic.

TOMORROW: Who started the thought balloon’s hibernation over the last thirty years?

The Most Endangered Comma

As long as I’m talking commas, I should mention last month’s Twitterfuffle over the “Oxford comma” used before a conjunction in series, as in:

the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion

This punctuation is standard in most American book-publishing style guides but eschewed by newspapers, which prefer a minimal number of keystrokes. In the Great British Punctuation Shortage that followed World War 2, many British book publishers dropped the serial comma, with Oxford being one of the few institutional holdouts.

Last month an Oxford University Press memo on writing press releases told publicists to drop the comma in order to conform to journalistic style. This was reported on Twitter as the end of the Oxford comma, and there were several hours of mourning before the misunderstanding was corrected.

But the serial/Oxford comma is not the most endangered type, I believe. Rather, that’s the comma that sets off a term of direct address.

Back in 2006, Linda Lowenthal sounded the warning at Copyediting:

Just look at your e-mail messages: “Hi Linda,” most of mine begin, perhaps under the influence of the superficially similar let ter opener “Dear Linda.” But don’t blame e-mail, either: song, book, and movie titles from long before the Internet age are full of plain blank spaces before or after a name or the equivalent where we might think a comma should go. “Please Mr. Postman.” “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.” Baby It’s You. Even Goodnight Moon.

The popular reading of “SURRENDER DOROTHY” that I discussed yesterday fits this pattern.

These commas vanish most common in informal writing, of course. Missing commas in direct address are almost a hallmark of online fanfiction. But the problem is creeping into more formal, edited types of prose. Readers, we must stop this travesty!


From The Writing Resource.

The Wizard Will Explain It!

As long as I’m on the topic of this message from the MGM Wizard of Oz, how do you read this message grammatically?

The “SURRENDER” is an imperative verb, but to whom is it addressed? Most people seem to treat that as a message to Dorothy, which should have been punctuated as “SURRENDER, DOROTHY.”

Without the comma, “DOROTHY” becomes the object of the verb. The Witch’s message is therefore directed at the Wizard and the people of the Emerald City, telling them to turn Dorothy over to her.

Two additional facts about this moment in the movie, according to Aljean Harmetz’s Making of The Wizard of Oz:

• A special-effects man wrote the message using a syringe filled with ink inside a tank of water, producing the effect of skywriting without the expense.
• The message was originally “SURRENDER DOROTHY OR DIE, WWW”. But the movie’s editors realized that just the first two words made the message abundantly clear.

Or did it?

Sarcasm for the Masses

Three years after Oz and Ends suggested using backslant (i.e., left-leaning italics) as a way to signal written sarcasm, Sartalics.com has take up the suggestion.

They offer links to an online petition.

Because those always have so much effect.

And a Twitter feed.

Since no one else has one of those.

More on proposed sarcasm indicators here and here.

Gasp! A Short History of Comic-Book Exhalations

Last month master comics letterer Todd Klein looked at the evolution of a form of punctuation unique to comics: breath marks.

Those are little radiating lines—Klein notes they became standardized to three on each side—around certain words in comic-book dialogue. Experienced readers understand that the character doesn’t speak that such a word, nor does it approximate any sound from the character’s mouth.

Rather, the word within breath marks is a label for the sound the character makes and its emotional meaning. Breath marks and the word balloon’s tail are the equivalent of “he sobbed” or “she sighed” or “the whole crowd gasped” in prose.

Using panels from early DC Comics, Klein traces early comic-book letterers’ struggles to show characters’ non-verbal sounds within word balloons. At first they used parentheses—which were also part of how some comics signaled thoughts. But after a few years letterers codified the use of this new punctuation mark.

Letterer Nate Peikos has said that breath marks are also called “cat’s whiskers,” “fireflies,” and “crow’s feet.” On Klein’s blog writer Kurt Busiek offers another alternate term: “roachlegs.” He comments:

I remember working with one editor [Cat Yronwode, this discussion suggests] who insisted that anything that would ordinarily be enclosed in roachlegs be spelled out as a sound, so “gasp” became “H-hh!” or something. [T]he reasoning was that no one in a book or movie would actually say “gasp,” and so such things were comic-booky.

My argument that in books they do it through narration, but comics evolved other methods, and if we were going to shy away from comic-booky things, it was worth noting that in books and movies when people talked, big white ovals with their words in them didn’t appear over their heads, and loud noises didn’t manifest as floating letters, either, fell on deaf ears.

Opinion appears to be divided on how best to signal breath marks in a script:

>cough!< *wheeze* =puff puff=

I recently typed my first *sigh*, but I was trying to match this classic style. I actually prefer the sound-effect approach—more showing than telling.

Superman Battles the Challenge of Thought!

This panel is from Action Comics, #6, the sixth comic book to contain a Superman story. Lois Lane and Clark Kent are building that wonderful relationship which, a mere half-century later, convinced fans they were meant to be together forever.

In this panel, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster clue us in on Lois and Clark’s unexpressed thoughts. But to understand that, we have to know the code the creators used to set off characters’ thoughts from their spoken words in the same balloon: parentheses, dashes, and quotation marks.

I assume some American comic-strip creators tackled the challenge of showing thought before Siegel and Shuster, but I don’t know what they came up with. The early strips I could find are surreal tales like Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, and those characters rarely had unexpressed thoughts. (When Ignatz was puzzled in this strip, Herriman gave him a regular word balloon filled with a big question mark.)

That approach wouldn’t work in a more realistic scene. It’s notable that these examples show Clark Kent thinking secretly; Superman didn’t need to conceal his thoughts in these early stories.

In Action, #11, Clark expressed his thinking inside what later became codified as a “whisper balloon.” Indeed, it’s possible that Clark is whispering to himself here, the way a character in a radio or stage play can speak thoughts aloud while all the other actors pretend to ignore him. But that solution is obviously limited. A hero wouldn’t want to give away his game plan, even quietly, when he was around the Ultra-Humanite or some other villain.

In the early 1940s most American comic books adopted a standard form for showing thoughts: the thought balloon. These word balloons had a trail of ovals to the thinking character rather than a sharply pointing tail, and borders that differed from those of speech balloons, usually by being more cloudy.

Even so, the first of these panels from Action, #64, in 1943 show Siegel and Shuster’s successors pulling out the old technique of parentheses, hyphens, and quotation marks to squeeze a thought into a crowded panel. And they still use dashes and quotation marks inside Superman’s thought balloon to make its meaning doubly clear.

Marks of Irony and Sarcasm

At the recent gathering of children’s-book bloggers in Washington, I understand that mention was made of my past reports on humanity’s long quest to typographically signal sarcasm or irony. Though the internet has exacerbated this need, I’ve noted that some English writers discussed it 200 years ago. And I once suggested that the backslant could work as italics does, except by signaling reversal instead of emphasis.

Alas, adding a backslant style to every font and getting the new versions installed on every computer would be a lot of work, and we’d still have to teach people what the new letterforms mean. The same problems stymie the invention of new punctuation, such as Choz Cunningham’s 2006 proposal at Typophile of a mark called “the snark,” which looks like an exclamation point that’s given up and laid down.

People have therefore sought to popularize sarcastic uses of punctuation marks that are already on the standard English keyboards but of little use. For example, at my latter posting, an anonymous commenter replied:

We need to use the TILDE!
it works perfectly
~i'm so smart~
and we don't use it for anything but decoration anyway

However, a peek behind the tilde entry on Wikipedia shows that this usage is still evolving. The first suggestion that anyone was using the tilde to indicate irony appeared there in February 2008, and that contributor suggested it should appear at the end of a sentence, not around a statement.

A much older suggestion, through Wikipedia, starts with the seventeenth-century English printer Henry Denham’s mark to signal a rhetorical question:

How do you like them apples؟

Denham called this a percontation mark. It soon fell into abeyance.

In 1899, The Bookman’s “Literary Paris” columnist Adolphe Cohn reported to his American readers:

A new writer, who is much talked of just now, is M. Alcanter de Brahm. He has published a book, L’Ostensoir des Ironies, intended to demonstrate that the reader of modern books has to be told when the author intends to be ironical and when not, and he therefore advocates the creation of a new punctuation mark, the point d’ironie.

The new writer was actually an anagrammatic pseudonym of a minor French poet named Marcel Bernhardt. He suggested using a question mark reversed in some way. Wikipedia states it was a horizontal reversal producing a variation on the backwards question mark above. Wayne C. Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony (1974) says Bernhardt/de Brahm suggested using the upside-down question mark from Spanish—

So we can see what a splash the idea made¿

Only one language seems to have a typographic signal of reverse meaning already in widespread use, and I learned of it through a familiar but unexpected source. Back in 2005, Neil Gaiman wrote on his blog:

(If I say “in my copious spare time”, can we all agree that it should be read as if someone had actually invented the sarcasm mark as a unit of punctuation, and that “in my copious spare time” can be assumed to be inside sarcasm marks?)

And then this month he added:

The last time I posted here about the lack of sarcasm marks in punctuation, people wrote in to tell me that there are Ethiopian languages that actually have a written sarcasm mark, intended to show the world that the person writing means the opposite of what he says. So if anyone is translating this blog into Ethiopian, you’ll need to put sarcasm marks around that bit of yesterday's post.

Language Log has also taken note of that punctuation mark, which is known as Temherte Slaq. It reports, “The Unicode representation of the punctuation mark is evidently under debate among Ethiopian scholars.”

And what is the crux of that debate? A paper titled “A Roadmap to the Extension of the Ethiopic Writing System Standard Under Unicode and ISO-10646,” by Asteraye Tsigie, Berhanu Beyene, Daniel Aberra, and Daniel Yacob, states:

Graphically indistinguishable from U+00A1, Temherte Slaq differs in semantic use in Ethiopia. Temherte Slaq will come at the end of a sentence (vs at the beginning in Spanish use) and is used to indicate an unreal phrase, often sarcastical in editorial cartoons. Temherte Slaq is also important in children’s literature and in poetic use. Debate is needed among Ethiopian scholars to determine if inverted exclamation mark is acceptable.

In other words, even though experts agree the Temherte Slaq is “graphically indistinguishable” from a punctuation mark already in use, some insist it deserves its own unique coding.

And that wouldn’t delay the worldwide adoption of the Temherte Slaq at all¡