Punctuate this!
Kill the Colon, our rant about obscenely long book titles, drew a great suggestion from Patrick, a Read Street regular. Thinking about punctuation marks, he recalled that he had invented the Tentative Hyphen.
He wrote: "It looks like a squiggly hyphen. Its widespread use would improve writers' spelling immensely. Take the adjective upside-down. It gets spelled three ways: upside-down, upsidedown and upside down. With my Tentative Hyphen, the word would look like this: upside~down.
"The TH is kind of a joker in the deck. ... If the correct spelling is upside-down, the TH represents an ordinary hyphen. If the correct spelling is upsidedown, the TH disappears. If the correct spelling is upside down, the TH represents a space. With a Tentative Hyphen, the writer can't go wrong."
I love the idea. There must be more possibilities out there. What do you propose for a new punctuation mark? Now back to Patrick ...
"A writer needs every break he or she can get. It is a natural progression for two words, such as post man, to gradually become one hyphenated word, such as post-man, and finally a single unhyphenated word, such as postman.
"Heck, we fought a bloody war in a country without reaching a consensus on whether the nation's name should hyphenated. Were we in Viet-nam or Vietnam? Well, we were in Viet~nam. Today, do we send e-mails or emails? For sure we send e~mails. ...
"Because I invented the helpful Tentative Hyphen, it seems only fair that computers be programmed to ship me a nickel each time one is used. Once I've accumulated a sufficient sum that odd noises in my car no longer make me worry about how much the problem will take to fix, the Tentative Hyphen can become free. It will be a gift from one bad speller to all the others."
Image from BBC
Comments
How about the Elevated Ellipsis? The EE would be typed out as three consecutive periods centered vertically in the middle of the line, for those who cannot determine when to use a real ellipsis (indicating an omission of words). The EE would be especially useful in the journaling of angst-ridden teenagers (or is that angstridden?). It’s about time for the en-dash and em-dash to get a new sibling, too.
Posted by: Gregg Wilhelm | July 20, 2008 6:25 PM
My only complaint is that we're looking at a tilde, which technically is not punctuation. But stuff like this is how periods got turned into "dots".
We only have 14 punctuation marks now, and way too many people don't know how to use many of them. Won't one more make it worse?
Posted by: Claude | July 21, 2008 5:32 PM
I agree. Given the apparent inability of most writers to master the conventional punctuation marks, or for that matter, a sentence longer than a single declarative clause, I have to question the utility of additions. I do admit, however, to a nostalgic sense of loss that we no longer favor the 19th-century semicolon-dash compound.
Posted by: John McIntyre | July 21, 2008 7:37 PM
This is a terrible idea. And for the record, the country refers to itself as Viet Nam. No hyphen, no discussion. Just two words that mean "Viets of the South," Viets being the cultural entity from which the nation broke off of in Southern China.
I'm fairly certain this post is supposed to smack of sarcasm. I least I hope. Maybe you should toss a few interrobangs in to make sure.
Posted by: Colin | July 22, 2008 2:02 PM