979. Explore the fascinating origins of punctuation and how it evolved to shape written language. Plus, learn techniques to untangle confusing noun clusters and bring clarity to your writing.
979. In the first segment, we unravel the mysteries surrounding the origins and transformation of punctuation. From the early days when words ran together without spaces, to the introduction of punctuation systems by scholars like Aristophanes, we explore how punctuation has played a pivotal role in shaping written communication.
In the second segment, we look at noun clusters that can gum up your writing. You'll see how simple steps like reordering, adding clarifying words, and transforming nouns into verbs can transform noun clusters from mind-bending to crystal clear.
> The punctuation segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
> The noun clusters segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at DragonflyEditorial.com.
| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/punctuation-noun-clusters/transcript
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, I have a fun piece of history about the origin of punctuation, and then some useful tips about avoiding noun clusters. And then, of course, Thursday, I'll have another Grammar Girl Conversations interview, this week with Anne Curzan about her new book, "Says Who?" and why linguists should take marketing tips from Apple and why Ben Franklin thought the word "colonize" was bad. Watch for it in your feed.
This first segment is about punctuation is by Valerie Fridland.
by Valerie Fridland
There are so many things in life that just make you wonder who came up with the idea in the first place –like flaming hot Cheetos, sky-diving and pantyhose. As someone who spends a lot of time discussing the relative merits of punctuation in its various forms and functions, I’ve always wondered how the whole idea of punctuation developed in the first place. After all, periods might seem naturally necessary to tell us when a sentence is finished, but semicolons are a whole different ball game.
Considering that the ancient Greeks also gave us the concept of parts of speech and impressive philosophizing, it might not be that surprising that they also introduced a punctuation system about two thousand years ago. But even the Greeks were not that dedicated to regular punctuation. In antiquity, very few people were literate, and writing was not regarded the same way it is today. Instead, public speaking was prized and the development of strong oratory skills was the focus of most education. The point of writing anything down was to record it to be spoken at a later date – and texts were intended to be read aloud, often in front of others, and not silently. In other words, writing was in service of speaking and not the other way around.
For this reason, punctuation that divides sentences as we know and love today didn't exist, since the focus instead was on rhetorical effect, or how to powerfully and persuasively speak a text. Unlike modern times, authors tended to dictate their works (not write them themselves) and scribes had to produce texts slowly and painstakingly by hand. As a result, written works were relatively few in number and generally well-known and studied. People didn't just pick up a book and start reading it for fun like we do today. Instead, they would have already been familiar with what they were reading, since a big part of education at the time was memorizing and giving oral presentations of famous texts.
Perhaps even more surprising, in ancient Greece, texts typically had all the words running together with no spaces, a habit also adopted by the later Romans, who copied texts in what was referred to as “scriptio continua.” Sometimes a capital letter indicated the start of a new section, but we don’t see much in the way of helpful separation of any part of the text until around the 2nd century BCE, when the start of a new paragraph was sometimes indicated by having the first few letters further out into the margin.
Around this same time, Aristophanes, the librarian of Alexandria, is credited with coming up with the first Western punctuation system and introduced the now familiar names of comma, colon, and period (known at the time as the “periodus”). However, instead of their modern functions of separating parts of sentences according to how they relate to each other (like a comma setting off a modifying adverbial phrase), this early system was about indicating how to properly present a text orally, with dots (i.e., periods) used to make sure breaths and pauses occurred in the right spots to make what one was saying come across most powerfully for rhetorical effect. In Aristophanes’ system, dots were placed either high, mid or low next to a final letter to indicate how long a pause one should take before continuing. Writing experts today will absolutely tell you it's wrong to use a comma when you'd pause if you were speaking — that's not how rules work for modern punctuation — but back in Aristophanes' time, a comma actually was all about taking a brief pause.
Still, Aristophanes’ rhetorical punctuation scheme didn't gain a huge amount of traction in terms of how texts were actually written during the time of the Greeks or Romans. For most of antiquity and up through the Middle Ages, punctuation conventions were simply whatever was preferred by the people working with a text by putting notes about section or paragraph breaks in the margins, or noting where to take pauses by using either spaces or dots in somewhat similar fashion to what was suggested by Aristophanes.
The expectation was that a person spent considerable time preparing before reading a text out loud, requiring the orator to come up with their own interpretation of the text and its important components. Obviously, not having pre-existing punctuation marks telling you whether a sentence was declarative, interrogative or exclamatory made things a little dicey, but the language of the text contained hints via the words themselves, like the equivalent of interrogative words such as “what” or “why.” for instance. Around the 4th century, it became more common to find texts that were annotated by others, rather than leaving it up to each individual reader, prompted in particular by concern that a text be properly interpreted, especially when it came to Christian works like the Bible.
By the twelfth century, the purpose of texts had extended to scholarly reading, which was less focused on public reading. This led to a bit more attention to the layout of a text and scribes by that point were consistently using spaces between words and incorporating various forms of what had been used in the past to indicate how long to pause or the breaks between sections, but there was still no consensus around punctuation practice.
Until quite recently, the function of punctuation was to help highlight the meaning of certain parts of a text through pausing, so it wasn't meant to help readers understand how parts of a sentence related to each other as it is today. This idea of punctuation as a grammatical device, rather than a rhetorical one, didn't gain steam until the introduction of the printing press around the 15th century.
At this point, books became easier to produce and more prevalent, and silent reading was becoming more common. Generally, printers came up with their own punctuation conventions that they used for all their printing, and one of the most influential systems was created by a popular Italian printer named Aldus Manutius. It was Manutius who pulled together various previous punctuation tendencies and came up with a system using marks such as the semicolon, the comma, and the question mark. Manutius used these marks to indicate how words and phrases were divided for the reader (rather than for being read aloud) – a first step on the way to the punctuation conventions we follow today. For instance, Manutius was the first to introduce the serial comma as we use it for separating components of lists today.
It wasn't until the 18th century, though, that the function of punctuation fully transitioned from being about breaths and pauses to being about grammar, a surprisingly recent adoption for something that we have such strong opinions about today. So, the next time you get caught up in a debate about the necessity of the Oxford comma, just remember that a few centuries ago, punctuation was all in the eye of the beholder.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
By Samantha Enslen
A noun string is a group of nouns or adjectives clumped together to create one single term. They can create confusing and clunky text. To fix a noun string, reorder the phrase to start with the final noun, add prepositions and articles to clarify meaning, and look for opportunities to convert nouns into verbs.
Our tidbit for today is about noun strings.
Noun strings are groups of nouns or adjectives mashed together to create a single term. Every word in the string adds to the meaning of the final noun.
Some noun strings are straightforward. For example:
You probably understood those terms without any problems. At just three words each, they’re not too long. They’re familiar, and they're convenient shorthand for well-known concepts.
Where we get into trouble is when noun strings start stretching out beyond three words. For example:
When all of these nouns get clustered together, it’s hard to tell which one is most important – or even what the phrase is supposed to mean.
Luckily, there are two simple ways to fix these brain-numbing noun strings.
Method 1: Reorder the string, then add prepositions and articles
The first way to fix noun strings is by reordering the string, starting with the last word, and then adding prepositions and articles for clarity.
You see, one thing that makes noun strings confusing is that the most important word is at the end! Let's take our first example: heart disease risk reduction protocols. What are we talking about here? A protocol... a series of steps a patient would take to get more healthy. So let’s reorder the phrase to start with "protocol":
Then we'll add prepositions and articles to clarify the meaning. That gives us:
That’s a little bit longer than our original noun string, but much easier to understand.
Let’s look at our next example: low-income neighborhood preschool scholarship fund.
We’ll reorder the phrase and pull the words at the end up to the beginning. We'll start with:
Then we’ll add prepositions and articles:
Again, much easier to understand!
Method 2: Change nouns to verbs
A second way to fix noun strings is to convert words that are in a noun form into a verb form. That clarifies meaning and adds some action to your phrase.
Let’s see how to do it with this mouthful: Emerald Ash Borer elimination tree trunk injection method.
Yuck. OK.
In this phrase, "elimination" and "injection" are the clunky noun forms of the verbs "to eliminate" and "to inject." Let’s fix that. We’ll again start by grabbing the word at the end of this phrase – "method" – and moving it to the beginning.
Then, let’s turn those bloated nouns into verbs. That gives us:
Now we can see the action that’s going on.
(By the way, in case you don’t know, the Emerald Ash Borer is an invasive insect that’s been destroying ash trees across the United States for years. It’s one bug we do want to eliminate!)
And here’s one final example: animal rights promotion rally.
In this phrase, the verb “to promote” is hidden in the noun “promotion.” Changing that gives us:
That’s one rally we could probably all get behind … unless, of course, the animals in question were Emerald Ash Borers.
In any case, that’s your tidbit for today. You can fix a noun string in three easy steps: reorder it starting with the last word, add prepositions and articles to clarify meaning, and turn clunky nouns into active verbs.
That segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at DragonflyEditorial.com.
Finally, I have a familect mystery from Grammarpaloozian Sue Cloud.
She says, "When I was little and asked what something was, my dad would say "it's a wing wang for a mucket." Even now as an adult, I have no idea what this means." It was more of a teasing answer than a serious answer. As a child she thought it meant he didn't know the answer, but as an adult she now thinks it was when he didn't feel like explaining or that the answer wasn't kid-friendly.
So I did some searching and I couldn't find anything about a saying like this. "Wing wang for a mucket." The best I found is that a "mucket is a type of freshwater mussel, and since Sue's father grew up on the Chesapeake, that *could* make sense, but it could also just be a coincidence.
If you've ever said this or heard anyone say it or know where it comes from, please let me know! It may just be a familect, a thing one person said for fun, but it's also possible it's regional or even WWII military slang, since Sue said her father was
born around 1925 in Baltimore, Maryland, and fought in the South Pacific during World War II on an aircraft carrier in the Navy. So if you know anything about a wing wang for a mucket, please let me know.
You can call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL or tag me on social media.
That's also the number if you want to share your familect, a word your family and only your family uses,
And now, if you're a Grammarpalooza subscriber you can also send a voice memo. I send text messages twice a week with fun language stories, answer questions, and apparently now try to solve familect mysteries. To sign up, visit https://joinsubtext.com/grammar or text "hello" to (917) 540-0876.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to ad operations specialist, Morgan Christianson; audio engineer, Nathan Semes; director of podcasts, Brannan Goetschius; digital operations specialist, Holly Hutchings; marketing assistant, Kamryn Lacey, and marketing associate, Davina Tomlin, who is about to plant an absolutely absurd amount of basil.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. Remember to look for "Grammar Girl Conversations." This Thursday I have an interview with linguist Anne Curzan about her new book, "Says Who: A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words." And you can be sure we're going to talk about that word "funner" in the title!
That's all. Thanks for listening.
***
The following references for the punctuation segment did not appear in the audio, but are included here for completeness.
Baron, N. 2001. Commas and canaries: The role of punctuation in speech and writing. Language Sciences 23: 15–67.
Parkes, M.B. (1992). Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (1st ed.). Routledge.