The Art of Punctuation | Hacker News Reader

The Art of Punctuation

nationalreview.com

62 pointstintinnabula20 comments

“Hopefully, the professor will be able to seriously take the work on which I am presently engaged, which is, I believe, rather unique.”

"Hopefully" modifies "be" and is relocated to reflect colloquial speech patterns. Banning split infinitives is a legacy of trying to bend English to Latin grammar rules. "Presently" is a synonym of "Currently".

Looks like a perfectly cromulent sentence to me.

When used in the present tense, presently is indeed a synonym of currently. When used in the future tense—e.g., “I will be leaving presently”—it means “shortly,” since “currently” isn’t compatible with the future tense.

To me, "to seriously take" sounds strange not because it's split infinitive (there's nothing wrong with that), but "seriously" is not just an ordinary adverb here: it's a complement of the verb _take_. "To take the work seriously" is a very different thing from "to take the work," while "to engage the work seriously" is basically the same as "to engage the work," except more seriously.

And I don't think "seriously" (or a similar adverb), when used as a complement of "take," could just move around freely. Just like you can't say "I away chased the dog."

* And, while we're at it, it's a bad idea to take seriously (haha) anyone who thinks split infinitives are wrong. You can find tons of amusing writings by actual linguists here: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=Split+infi...

(Spoiler alert: they think the rule is BS.)

> But if the meaning is clear, I would ask students, why bother eliminating these mistakes? The answer is because not to do so is to risk offending people who know better, the educated, a small group, to be sure, some would even say an endangered species, but one that tends to be touchy about such matters.

I think you should "follow the rules," not out of fear of offending someone but because following these guidlines results in writing that is easier to understand. Even when the "meaning is clear," it can be made more clear (and have a greater result).

Compare

> Hopefully, the professor will be able to seriously take the work on which I am presently engaged, which is, I believe, rather unique.

with

> I hope the professor will take my unique work seriously.

There's a common argument that the purpose of language is communication, that mistakes don't matter if the desired information is communicated, and that prescriptive rules for punctuation and grammar are merely pedantry.

However, that argument is self-defeating. The purpose of language is obviously communication, yes. Mistakes might not hinder communication in some cases, sure. The rules of grammar have changed throughout history and are somewhat arbitrary, granted.

However, as the ideas one wishes to communicate become more complex, abandoning the greater set of grammatical tools makes ones sentences more difficult to read. I see this all the time in professional environments of all places. I frequently have to reread communications because someone was too lazy to proofread.

And as for language changing through time? It does. But that's not carte blanche for making whatever changes one wishes. Language change has to come about by collective agreement, not by some cowboy who doesn't like grammatical rules.

I try to operate under the principle of taking care to be clear with what I say or write and to take care to understand what I hear or read. (It's the human version of internet protocols or combinational logic levels.)

This is a very strong position if you care about trying to transfer thoughts from one person to another, but there are two problems. The first is that the people you are interacting with might not share the same protocol, which can be frustrating (even with just slight variations in levels of effort), and the other is that not all communication is about transferring thoughts.

Normative statements about how communication ought to occur, like whether one needs to follow prescriptive rules, are akin to the way engineers debate an API design. In the end, it is about setting a boundary that determines who has to do what work. The more clear you are (and clarity can take quite a lot of effort!) means less work for the recipient (which, if it is something you think they must know, then it might be worth it). The more effort you put into understanding someone means less work for the speaker/writer (which, if it is something you want to know, then it might be worth it). Conflict arises when there are different expectations, here like anywhere else -- for example, two housemates with different expectations for cleanliness.

Many people believe at some level that if they say something, then the utterance has exactly the meaning they intended it to have. This is despite the fact that symbols have no inherent meaning, but rather they are constructed to trigger something in the mind of the recipient. Such people might actively resist answering any questions for clarification since they believe they were clear enough and don't need to do any more work. They might think the question comes from a place of pedantry since they know what they meant.

There are some people who don't care to be clear and don't care to figure out what you are trying to say. Some people even add a bit of noise into their interpreter if it's something they know they don't want to understand, for whatever reason that might be.

When one person corrects or questions the speech of another, this is sort of a side channel, communicating either "I want you to be clearer" or "I am taking care to understand you." Unfortunately, there is not a good way to distinguish between the two without knowing the person well enough. Lots of talking is just to maintain a relationship of some kind, and highly precise language can be inappropriate since sometimes all someone wants is to be heard, even if not 100% understood.

It's nice when two people know the channel model well enough, so to speak, to be able to have high-bandwidth low-effort interactions.

The high-bandwidth, low-effort interactions you're talking about might only work with quick, two-way exchanges, as in a spoken conversation. In that regard, I definitely have a weird English variant among friends. I enjoy the broken English of so many memes.

There's an additional layer of language where you can switch to a different variant of the rules as part of communication. Speaking in another register defines the tone of the interaction.

But I'd still like to defend standard English as the default even in informal groups, because the standard makes it readily accessible to many people and ensures as much permanence as one can get from language.

All that said, I have one more flip-flopping disclaimer. I think some of the rules agreed upon before are really dumb. Putting punctuation in quotation marks if the punctuation is not from the quote is monstrous. I will not follow that rule in any context.

Agreed, a lot of grammarians are pedantic for sport. To bring this around, since this is hacker news: the way I think about it is as error correcting codes. For a given sentence, with a certain amount of errors, others can still understand it, but beyond a threshold, you can't (without thinking hard) . The Rules give us that margin for when we make mistakes.

I think this gels with your point about professional environments - as ideas get more complex, that margin for error gets slimmer.

I think another advantage is making writing easier. Consistent style guides can reduce cognitive load while writing, in the same why that a consistent design language or design system can reduce cognitive load while developing software user interfaces.

I see your point - it is easier to write in a consistent manner than not - but my experience matches the adage that it takes longer to write shorter.

Relevant (https://www.stilldrinking.org/nobody-understands-punctuation)

This is just outstanding, thank you kindly.

Unrelevant, but still great:

https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks

Hilarious, and remarkably close to reality too, sadly.

> In 1927 in New Jersey, a man named Salvatore Merra was wrongly executed because of the want of a semicolon in a jury’s sentencing

Here are the actual words that led to his execution:

"In the Merra case the dissenting justices pointed out that the jury's verdict was originally recorded as follows:"

We find the defendant Salvatore Merra guilty of murder in the first degree and the defendant Salvatore Rannelli guilty of murder in the first degree, and recommend life imprisonment at hard labor.

"which was amended by the trial judge to read:"

We find Salvatore Merra guilty of murder in the first degree. We find Salvatore Rannelli guilty of murder in the first degree and recommend life imprisonment.[1][2]

It does seem like an injustice happened here. The jury's verdict as originally recorded is a little ambiguous, but to my mind, the recommendation of life imprisonment would seem to apply to both. Although this doesn't seem like a comma vs semicolon issue so much as a judge taking liberty to change the wording and not clarifying the intention with the jury. The straightforward thing to do during the appeal would've been to find the jurors and ask them what they meant; I guess that wasn't (legally) allowed.

[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/new-jersey/appellate-division-p...

[2] https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/3586846/state-v-merra/ [from the Supreme Court of New Jersey]

Despite decades of training, it still rankles me to use a bare apostrophe for the possessive of a proper noun ("Moses'.") I've never pronounced it that way, and neither has anyone else, that I've noticed.

Relevant book: Eats, shoots and leaves

Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Eats-Shoots-Leaves-Lynne-Truss/dp/0...

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves

> “Hopefully, the professor will be able to seriously take the work on which I am presently engaged, which is, I believe, rather unique.” The meaning of the sentence is clear enough, though it contains four mistakes.

I don't mean to brag, but I got 0 of 4 on both the first, initial reading and the second reading. :)

Only 2 of those are valid. The battle against "hopefully" as a sentence adverb was lost decades ago, and there was never a strong argument against split infinitives.

This remind me of the excellent read ‘Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style’, if you are interested in stuff like this. I cannot recommend it enough. But, be warned, your friends and family might think you have turned bonkers reading a “grammar book” voluntarily.

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