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no-inverted-commas
Damian Cugley’s Weblog
Well, it is true that one can often infer whether a typewriter quotation mark is an apostrophe or turned comma according to its position. On the other hand, why bother having marks of quotation at all, since they can be guessed from the words anyway? Many prose writers despise quotation marks and just do not use them. It is increasingly popular to represent non-spoken words (such as a character’s thoughts) in italics rather than set off by quotation marks.
While we’re at it, do we need apostrophes anyway? George Bernard Shaw despised them and did not use them (he wrote dont, cant), except for words that would become ambiguous (such as I’ll, we’re). We could go futher by writing these as two words (I ll, we r), the elision of the vowels being implied by their not being written rather than the presence of a special mark.
What about the possessive case?, I hear you ask. Well, bear in mind that words like Peter’s, Anne’s are really abbreviations of an Anglo-Saxon declension or inclination or whatever the term is, and they could be written Peteres, Annes. After all, we no longer write pass’d, sort’d as Shakespeare might have; the suppression of the sound of the e is recognized by convention. Some spelling reformers have suggested the opposite tack, where the vowel is omitted: passd, sortd (and similarly for akr (acre), theatr). This gives us three apostrophe-free variations on the possessive case:
Spelling reformers might prefer Petrz, Anz!
Note the distinction between cant and we r. I dont favour can nt, because the pronounciation of can now depends on its being followed by nt. So it makes sense to write it cant. You have to guess from context that it is not intended to be the word cant (as in thieve s cant), just as you already have to distinguish read (sounds like reed) from read (sounds like red).
Hey! Let s get rid of hyphens and dashes too! Dashes in principle can be replaced by colons or commas, depending on how they are used. Hyphens appear in compound words like X-ray and mother-in-law. We could require these compounds to be spelled either as two words or as one and ban the halfway hyphenated comounds. Let s face it, most writers these days do anyway. Hyphens also appear in phrases used attributively, as in a bright-red balloon (versus the balloon was bright red). Of course these hyphens are often omitted through ignorance anyway.
Come to think of it who needs punctuation anyway it s not as if we have commas and colons and semicolons appearing in the air around us as we speak unless you count the occasional sketching of quotation marks to indicate heavy handed irony so why should we bother marking off parenthetical remarks and subsidiary clauses and suchlike when we write ? I suppose it might be useful to retain question marks and perhaps end of sentence punctuation has a role to play although I rather fancy that if you actually transcribed people s speach patterns without trying to post rationalize some sort of gramatical structure you would end up deciding that most people speak one long sentence with endless repetitions and digressions from birth until death with the occasional pause for eating and sleeping Better still we can save 25% of the space needed for text b y o m i t t i n g t h o s e n e e d l e s s s p a c e s b e t w e e n w o r d s . y o u w o u l d n e e d t o r e p r o g r a m b r o w s e r s t o w r a p b e t w e e n c h a r a c t e r s . e v e n f u l l s t o p s a n d c a p i t a l l e t t e r s a r e r e d u n d a n t a s e a c h s e n t e n c e c o u l d e n d w i t h a s i n g l e s p a c e . a n d i h a v n t e v n s t a r t d o n s p e l n g r e f o r m . . .
