Punctiliousness

“ I would almost go myself to prove my penitence (to you!) , but I just can't bring myself to do that, because for me it really would be useless and would turn me against everything you count as holy. Forget all that has cast a shadow on our love. Count it all as my heedlessness and be confident that I alone was to blame. I would write more, but letters are such impossible things for intimacy. Some people can pour out their souls on paper: I can't. That's really what my poems suffer from. ”

“ But as the best of things are the most liable to abuses, so has the cause of punning suffered much from the want of judgment evinced by many of its votaries. Anxious, as far as possible, to contribute to maintaining this noble art in the possession of its well-merited reputation, we venture a few words of caution to some of its professors on the errors too frequently committed by them. ”

“ The er is irresistible—the little wretches feel the insult to their very backbone, and make off at once. That the kutchers endure the er is astonishing. I could not address them so: for surely it is the excess of inhumanity as well as insolence to use a form of speech that denotes contempt to persons who have never offended you. ”

“ Like all the instincts pugnacity has two aspects, the mental and the physical, and appears in the forms of anger and of combat. In both its forms, it is a very early, a very permanent and a tremendously powerful instinct. ”

“ I’m trying to warn you against that habit which so many people have of staring at the ground, and seeing and knowing nothing as they go along through life. I’ve suffered from it myself, Punch, more than I care to tell, and that’s why I speak feelingly, and wish to warn you in time, my boy. ”

“ So the ambiguous word "too" does not embarrass us when we read: "This problem, too, easy as it may seem, remains unsolved." (See other examples under Rules XIV. and XV.) Only occasionally, how [11] ever, can clearness be secured by punctuation. No pointing can help us much in Gray's line, or could have given to Pyrrhus the true reading of "Credo te Æacida Romanos vincere posse." And, even where it would make the meaning clear, it is a lazy device, the over-use of which is the sure sign of careless or unskilful composition. The true remedy for ambiguity is not punctuation, but re-writing. ”

“ LUNCH (continued) .—How delightful it is to awaken interest in the female breast, to make the heart of lovely woman go pit-pat, as her eyes read the words one’s pen has written. Even in drawing-rooms and boudoirs, it seems, bright eyes have marked these attempts to teach a correct conversational manner to those who engage in game-shooting. Here is one letter of the hundreds that Mr. Punch has one by one pressed to his gallant lips with an emotion that might, perhaps, not have been expected from one of his years and discretion. But how shall time or caution prevail against universal love? ”

“ This store which men and women set on pleasure and pain, Prendick, is the mark of the beast upon them,—the mark of the beast from which they came! Pain, pain and pleasure, they are for us only so long as we wriggle in the dust. ”

“ Amateurs in literary composition soon acquire the bad habit of writing carelessly; they spell strange names in two or more different ways; they form capital letters, and even the small lower-case letters, so obscurely that one word may be mistaken for another; they have no clearly defined system, or at least observe none, for the proper placing of capitals, italic, and the marks of punctuation.
The above sentence is from the preface of what is probably the most complete work on composition written in recent years. ”

“ Is it metaphor to say that the boy asked the servant to do this, or is it not rather pedantry to insist on the letter of a bond and deny its spirit, by denying that language passed, on the ground that the symbols covenanted upon and assented to by both were uttered and received by eyes and not by mouth and ears? When the lady drank to the gentleman only with her eyes, and he pledged with his, was there no conversation because there was neither noun nor verb? Eyes are verbs, and glasses of wine are good nouns enough as between those who understand one another. ”

“ How often have the asperities incident to conversation been instantly softened down by the means of a well-timed pun? How many a rising storm of colloquial debate and controversial wrath has been dispelled by the same salutary agency, when wisdom would have failed to convince, or mediation to conciliate? The able punster has perhaps more frequent opportunities than any other character, of securing the blessing pronounced upon the peace-maker. ”

“ It may be doubted whether the mark of exclamation is in such cases of any great service; for the impressiveness of a sentence ought to appear in the sentence itself, or to be given to it by the context. There is a real danger, as the style of many people shows, in thinking that punctuation is intended to save the trouble of careful composition. ”

“ The affective tone of some of our perceptions and actions may be so vague as to be apparently non-existent. When we are doing some very simple and habitual action, such as dressing or sharpening a pencil, the hedonic tone of the action may not be present in our consciousness at all. With reference to pleasure and pain the action is simply neutral. But even such simple actions tend to have a definite affective tone. If the morning be cold, dressing is felt to be disagreeable, and when one is using a very sharp knife the act of sharpening the pencil may be distinctly pleasant. ”

“ But these thoughtless and jeering bachelors will not stop to hear the wail of their challengers; they feel no pity for their despair; they have no stomach for their agony; but go their ways, leaving the wretched females rooted, transfixed, the picture of perfect hopelessness, and greeting them, ere they disappear from sight, with shouts of scoffing laughter, which the winds catch up and carry away out of earshot. ”

“ Naturally it makes him arrogant, but it also makes him independent; and where each man stands upon punctilio everybody is likely to be polite. So they had few quarrels, but such as they had were deadly. ”

“ The punctuation grows out of a writer’s desire to modify a meaning which he has expressed, frequently, in a word that is too strong. He follows this word with another in the or relation to the too-strong word. In order to show that the real or relation, as discussed under No. 17, does not exist between the two words, and that the relation of explanation (slightly parenthetical) , as discussed under No. 11, is the real relation, he applies the principle of disjunction, exhibited in another form in the discussion of Sentence 1, and uses the comma. ”

“ Still, let any one refer to that particular part of it, and, provided that his taste is a correct one, he will not fail to be struck with the deteriorating effect which Signor Piccini’s broken English and Italian loquacity have produced on the spirit of the original. Nothing is more characteristic of the real Mr. Punch than the laconic manner in which he expresses himself, and nothing at the same time is more English. ”

“ As we hope, gentle public, to pass many happy hours in your society, we think it right that you should know something of our character and intentions. Our title, at a first glance, may have misled you into a belief that we have no other intention than the amusement of a thoughtless crowd, and the collection of pence. We have a higher object. Few of the admirers of our prototype, merry Master PUNCH, have looked upon his vagaries but as the practical outpourings of a rude and boisterous mirth. ”

“ It was only that they had found words too blundering a vehicle to express emotions so strong and complex. But where the tongue fails, the glance of the eye and the pressure of a hand says in a moment what many words only darken and confuse. ”

“ Sufficient, we are persuaded, has been said to satisfy all persons of the value and excellence of punning, except indeed the obstinately incredulous; and such, as a just punishment, we would excommunicate for ever from the enjoyment of puns, and the society of punsters. ”

“ The mind refuses to grasp such a mass of comicality; how, then, would you classify this prodigious joviality and sarcasm? How detect a joke that may reappear under a hundred disguises of time, place, condition, and application—yet the same root-joke after all? Is it surprising that the same ideas recur—and, recurring, sometimes escape the shrewd eye of Punch's investigation department? ”

“ AYAH to punkah-coolie. (Stepping into veranda after a glance at the bed. ) . Punkah chor do! (Stop pulling the punkah.)
VOICE. It's hard, Pip. So very, very hard after one year—just one year.
(Wailing.) And I'm only twenty. Most girls aren't even married at twenty. Can't they do anything to help me? I don't want to die. ”

“ Or perhaps they can find neither the time, nor the self-denial, nor the self-possession to plunge in head first into this life and to watch it right up close, without prejudice, without sonorous phrases, without a sheepish pity, in all its monstrous simplicity and everyday activity... That material... is truly unencompassable in its significance and weightiness... The words of others do not suffice—even though they be the most exact—even observations, made with a little note-book and a bit of pencil, do not suffice. One must grow accustomed to this life, without being cunningly wise... ”

“ I'm in for an hour this time, and I wish I was out."
"What were the crimes?"
"Spilling ink, killing a fly in lessons—it had bitten me three times before I went for it—being impertinent, and getting different answers to my sums from the ones in the book, and a few other things."
"Dear me!" I said, "this is very bad. Why can't you get the right answers to your sums?" ”

“ The sole drawbacks are that, too often, the means adopted to secure the desired result depend more than should be upon sentiment which might almost be described as false; that the incidents occasionally have too little relation to real life; and that, what might have proved eminently touching, is marred by some involuntary association with the ludicrous and grotesque. In his anxiety to preserve his pupils from such pitfalls as these, Mr. Punch offers an example in which the blemishes he has hinted at have been sedulously avoided. ”

“ Withhold from the child the letter of the sick parent; deny the fagged artisan his breath of fresh air and half-holyday once a week, under a religious pretext, and Punch will protest you a Pharisee, and tell you that you might as well forbid him to extricate an ox, or a Mr. Dibdin, from a pit into which, he might happen to tumble on the Sabbath day. And if lies or delusions are propounded to his credence, tales, whether of table-talking or picture-working, Punch will not be hindered from laughing at them by the circumstance that they are preached beneath the cover of religion. ”

“ Those who value their own time lightly are seldom scrupulous about wasting that of their neighbour. Have we not all been lectured, again and again, on the sin of unpunctuality?
I think I hear you ask whether unpunctuality deserves to be ranked as a sin? Let us consider the question, then decide for yourselves. ”

“ Surely so slight a thing as a word might easily be eradicated from human speech, and yet how difficult it is to do so. But the point to consider is that the pertinacity, which shows itself in modes of expression, may very well exist in just as strong a form in habits of thought and feeling. ”

“ From these examples, the attentive reader must have already remarked that the tumultuous rush of words frequently results from the merest resemblance in sound. Not seldom does the riot of words degenerate into paltry quibbling, into the silliest pun, into the automatic association of words according to their sound, without regard to their meaning. ”

“ Perhaps more obscurity in language, often resulting in hurtful misunderstandings and expensive litigation, grows out of doubtful modifiers than out of any other source of bad construction. A knowledge of punctuation here serves a very useful purpose, not always by putting the proper mark in the proper place, but generally by showing the writer the necessity of recasting his sentence, thus removing the cause of any possible wrong interpretation. ”

“ Oh, that is it, he is always hungry—rub him on that. He thinks intently. Determination shows in every line of his face; the pen is almost gone only an inch remains, and then the Poet masters his subject. ”

“ Even in subjects which had no such elements of horror he finds the materials for the delectation of his ferocious pencil; he makes up for the defect by rendering with a brutal realism deformity and ugliness. ”

“ His eyes were drowsy with content as he slowly brought his fists to his shoulders, but even while he was twisting his bearded face into a mighty yawn his gaze flamed fire at hearing a staccato voice advise:
"I kind o' like ye that way. Keep 'em up." ”

“ Despite her sincerity, she is affected, and her arguments are often weakened by meretricious forms of expression. No one can for a moment doubt that her feelings are real, but neither can the turgidity and bombast of her language be denied. ”

“ Great care should be taken not to perplex the mind with too many rules before the necessity is created for their use. The great difficulty in the study of punctuation has been that many rules are committed to memory before the need of their use has arisen, so that the mind is perplexed and bewildered instead of enlightened. ”

“ You ought to be writing rhymes, and sulking and nursing your own petty thoughts and sensations, and busying yourself with psychological fancies and subtleties of all sorts, but at least don't mistake your sickly, nervous whims and irritability for manly indignation, for the honest anger of a man of convictions! ”