Connect/Eddie Holt: A book on punctuation is number one in the Amazon bestseller list. Full stops, commas, semi-colons and colons are, it appears, fashionable again. Question, quotation and exclamation marks are likewise in vogue.
Apostrophes are even being repatriated from alien plurals to appropriate possessives.
Correct punctuation hasn't been as cool in decades. The little marks could soon be seen in all the right places from which they've been expelled for a generation. It could be just a blip, of course. As soon as Lynn Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves starts to slip in popularity, punctuation could again become as debased as the language it's supposed to augment.
At the end of the day, going forward, year on year, you'd have to fear that the little marks might again be made as fatuous as those preceding and ubiquitous clichés. Still, Eats, Shoots & Leaves has performed almost miraculously. Its title, with that alchemical comma transforming two nouns into verbs, shows the raw power of the tiny mark.
Reading a poorly punctuated book on wildlife, Truss was struck by the fact that a comma could transmute a passive panda, which eats shoots and leaves, into a delinquent in a diner. She was worried when she wrote the book that "people would assume that anyone interested in punctuation would be small-minded". She had good reason.
Punctuation and pedantry have been almost synonymous for decades. Business types - though there are exceptions - who speak about "derivatives", "futures" and "gilts", seldom consider their own preoccupations arcane or pedantic. Mention of commas, colons and apostrophes, however, frequently incites them to ignorant dismissals and charges of priggishness.
Certainly there are chronic cases of constipated grammarians - neurotics who feign apoplexy over a split infinitive or at a sentence ending with a preposition - but such undeniable pedants are few now. The problem is that the rules of even basic punctuation are regularly considered a concern of only sad, stuffy, hair-splitting fogeys.
They shouldn't be. Language changes, of course, and cannot be mummified. But (yes, I know that's starting a sentence with a conjunction) it needn't be - even in an age of moronic management-speak - so thoroughly abused. Why, for instance, are so many politicians talking about "going forward, year on year"? Why do they meet "with" others of their ilk? What is wrong with "in future" or "annually"? Until a few years ago, people used to meet other people. "John met Mary" was - and still is - perfectly clear. Nowadays we are far more likely to be told that "John met with Mary". Yet "meeting" or "meeting with" is not just a matter of choice. The form chosen can have a profound effect on the meaning.
"Meeting with" could reasonably be taken to mean "to suffer" or "to endure". Kipling's poem, If, advising people should they "meet with Triumph and Disaster", has it right. Now Tony Blair "meets with" George Bush (alright, that could involve suffering and endurance!) instead of simply meeting him. They are, after all, allegedly friends.
It's not that people of this generation are more stupid or more intelligent than those of earlier generations. The decline in basic writing ability is linked to schools' curricula and to the values of the society in which we live. It's no secret that, even in third-level education, literacy is in crisis. It's no surprise either. The grounding needs to be done in primary school.
The world has changed, of course. It's not unusual to meet (whatever about "meeting with") the middle-aged or elderly parents of university students who write better English than their children. Many such parents, who may have had no more than a primary school education, can still write grammatical sentences beyond the ability of their progeny.
They were taught how to write letters, now replaced by e-mails and text messages. Used judiciously, e-mails and texts are wonderful innovations. Texting, in particular, naturally seeks brevity and that's fine. What it does to punctuation, however, is not. Punctuation helps give tone and rhythm to writing but in text messages it generally screams inappropriately.
Five consecutive exclamation marks do not add emphasis, especially when a reply includes six such marks. "Hi Mry!!!!!" is not outdone by "Hi Jhn!!!!!!". Both, presumably seeking an emphatic tone, are ultimately silly; likewise attempts at emphasis through the promiscuous use of capital letters.
It's encouraging that Lynn Truss's book is currently Amazon's bestseller. It suggests that many people are finally feeling ashamed of their ignorance of basic punctuation. Considering the vast number of over-written, jargon-infested business documents produced at present, properly written and punctuated ones could save millions of euro annually.
Maybe going forward, year on year, that will be sufficient to convince bosses to meet (alright, even "meet with") their companies' responsibilities to language. Then again, the success of Eats, Shoots & Leaves may be no more than a brief punctuation in the deluge of errant apostrophes, exclamation marks and silly capital letters swamping writing. We'll see.