Eats Shoots and Leaves

Lynn Truss’ admirable book has raised a lot of interesting comment. One commentator said that in the last few years we have started using more and different punctuation such as the tilda (~) and the ellipsis (…).

My late father was a printer and a stickler for punctuation and grammar, but perhaps more importantly he taught me as a child in the 1950’s to compose using moveable type.

One of the nightmares of this system, especially with the smaller faces is punctuation. Try telling the difference between a full stop and a comma, a colon and a semi-colon, or a numeric one and a shriek (exclamation mark)! And then there was the problem of finding some of the more unusual characters, which tended to be limited in number and hidden at the outer fringes of either the upper or lower case. On the other hand all compositors loved the chunky ellipsis!

So it was no wonder that punctuation tended to get simplified!

Now all typesetting is keyboard based, then anything is possible.

Let’s start a campaign for the return of the diphthong! My father would have been loved that!