The Perfect Book for Me (writing/editing/typesetting edition)

[jesse_the_k]

Making a Point: The Persnickety Story of English Punctuation

David Crystal

Published in US & UK in regular print and ebook
NLS downloadable audio DB 84113
braille in progress

This is the BEST book about English punctuation, where we have both rules and uncountable exceptions. Crystal is a linguist, historian and deft writer. He starts with the first English manuscripts, which didn’t even have word spaces. He then proceeds through every century, touching on “general practice” for the authors, editors, typesetters, printers and teachers. That last lot are a prescriptive bunch, although their diktats often clash.

He examines the full span of written, printed and typed English. He claims that periods carry a different emotional weight in text messages. He’s not quite sure what the digital natives mean by the swung-dash (~) character, but he recognizes it’s on the rise.

Read if … You’re eager to know the scores of punctuation marks that people introduced but never caught on.

Avoid if … You want the world to use your punctuation rules.

I'd appreciate knowing what you mean when you deploy the swung-dash (~) character?

Comments

[davidgillon]

Sounds interesting. I'd personally call 'swung-dash' the tilde. On looking things up they aren't quite the same character, but tilde is the digital native one, being an operator in several computer languages, so interpreting it as swung-dash is probably starting in the wrong place. I'd primarily use it to indicate 'approximately' on a value (though I'm more likely to use 'c' as abbreviated circa).

[jesse_the_k]

Cool, thanks for the data point. Punctuation terminology is one place where UK and US Englishes differ dramatically. Crystal manages to use both without causing confusion.

He also talks about the tilde expressing emotions. I've certainly seen it here and particularly Tumblr:
I wanted ~all the comics~ I saw at the con
but hope someone here can explain what that means.

[wild_irises]

The tilde is, at least historically, a diacritical mark, not a punctuation mark, i.e., it goes over a letter to change its pronunciation.

Personally, I don't use the swungdash for anything, but I'm delighted to know its name.

[jesse_the_k]

Sounds like a competitive square dancing contest, nu?

I learned its name when narrating a logic book for a blind student (as reported by one of my mathematical followers below, it can mean 'not' in that context).

[capri0mni]

I *heart* David Crystal (And his son, Ben, the Shakespeare evangelist). I haven't read any of his stuff, but I've seen snippets, on YouTube, of talks he's given on language, over the years.

Here's a bit of a talk he gave in Serbia, to a bunch of University students who're studying English as a second language, back in 2013, on how technology changes language:
https://youtu.be/qVqcoB798Is

And another bit of that same talk (I pull up this one when I need some cheering up):
https://youtu.be/SqkIv79KBTw

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks so much for those links. I've enjoyed everything he's ever written, and checking the inside flap of this book, there's tons more for me to explore.

[capri0mni]

You're welcome.

And to answer your question, I use the swung dash (love that term) for approximation, as well.

... and also (more playfully, in social writing) as a melodramatic version of a regular dash, around phrases ~like this~ in a sentence; I might starting think of it, therefore, as a swoon dash. ;)

[jesse_the_k]

:p)

[sanguinity]

I've also only heard it called a 'tilde', never a 'swung-dash'. In many places I use it to mean 'approximately' (~17.5K words), but when I use it in a sentence (he saw the ~mysterious figure~ on the tor) it has a bit a sarcastic ooo, woo swoopy sort of feeling to it, the kind where you over-enunciate every syllable and change pitches as you go.

I'll also sometimes use it as a no-formatting replacement for italicized-emphasis in forums where the interface automatically reformats *emphasis* into emphasis. But I'm usually already cranky when I do that (because of auto-reformatting that I'm trying to side-step) and am seldom fully pleased with the results.

[sasha_feather]

This is exactly how I use it / have seen it used.

[jesse_the_k]

♥

[jesse_the_k]

Ah, closer then. So does the "ooo, woo" convey that people who use the enclosed sentiments take themselves too seriously? around our town we say "woo woo" for people who are demonstrably spiritual.

I bet you're not loving Markdown that much. As it happens, the "start underline" character in Braille is "_" underscore, so I go for that as a replacement.

[sanguinity]

Yes, people expecting me to take them more seriously than I do. Which isn't quite the same thing as 'woo' as a synonym for spiritualism-I-don't-take-seriously, but there's obvs overlap there. (Conveying vocal tone in text alone is haaaaaard!)

I did not know it had a name! Yeah, weirdly, when I'm using Markdown kinds of text-markup (heh), I often need it to remain text-only, and get annoyed when it's auto-converted. That is, my end-goal is to create the first column, and not the third. But my big issue isn't really that Markdown exists -- it's a convenient thing! or could be! -- but that I usually have to turn it on/off one tag at a time, deep in preferences, and can't just toggle between "yeah, sure go ahead and auto-converrt" or "keep your freaking hands off my text, that's what I typed, and that's what I wanted" and be done with it.

[cathexys]

I call it tilde and we use it in symbolic logic as a the logical operator for negation. (that's actually print, not digital native)

And as I was looking for a good page to link, I just learned that in Boolean operators it apparently means synonyms. Gotta try that in my next google search!!!

[jesse_the_k]

I thought Google had suppressed all the Boolean tools. (That's why I switched to DuckDuckGo for complex searches).

When I was young I narrated a logic book to a blind mathematician; she's the one who taught me "swung dash." But then I learned to read it as "not."

In non-technical contexts online, I generally see exclamation mark ! for not. Freedom != liberty.

[luzula]

In non-technical contexts online, I generally see exclamation mark ! for not. Freedom != liberty.

Mathematically, that one is slightly different. That's when you have two things and you want to say that they are not equal. Say, 2 is not equal to 3.

What Cathexys is talking about is when you have a statement (a complete sentence, grammatically) and you want to convert it into its logical negation, that is, you want it to mean the complete opposite thing. That doesn't actually need to involve the word "not", for example:

A: All humans are less than 100 years old.

~A: At least one human is 100 years or older.

But if you have narrated a whole logic book, maybe you know this already! : )

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for that clear explanation. Have you ever considered teaching as a career?

😈

I wish that texts I've narrated and events I've interpreted stayed in my brain, but it goes right through and out my ears. Actually, if I had all those bits & bobs I'd be even more confused. My mathematician was a PhD candidate in set-theoretic topology, so the logic book was miles beyond my knowledge level.

[luzula]

Have you ever considered teaching as a career?

Ha ha. : P

And wow, did this post get a response. When in doubt, post about punctuation...

[lilysea]

I use

~

to separate paragraphs / sentences in a DW comment when I don't want the two to get run together/conflated/mixed up.

I also use ~ to mean approximately as in ~11am.

[jesse_the_k]

Wow! OK, so it's like a prettier dash. Nifty.

[cxcvi]

Additional technical use: In Linux-like operating systems, ~ refers to a user's home folder, and when follwed by a username, it can refer to someone else's home folder.

Less technical use: I sometimes use it to describe a range ("there will be 5~10 things") where using - ("there will be 5-10 things") would be ambiguous because of previous mathematical contexts. This can also be used to imply some level of approximation.

[jesse_the_k]

Oh yes! I should know this, since I use a Mac (Unix in a Belstaff coat).

In your less technical example, I would interpret the first example as "maybe 5, maybe 10," while the second would be 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

I'm rolling in delight with the pernicketiness of this thread. (No that's not a misspelling, see comment 9)

[luzula]

In math it can be used for several things, for example negation in logic, as Cathexys says (that is ~A means not-A, or the opposite statement). In the course I'm about to teach, A ~ B means that A and B are in a relation to each other. A relation is a broad concept in math and two simple examples of relations are A = B, A < B.

~ can also be used between two functions that are asymptotically equal (that is, they have the same limits at infinity). I generally don't use it for two numbers that are approximately equal. I use ≈ for that.

[jesse_the_k]

So what is this useful character called in other languages you know?

I love your last statement -- it's so 21st century :,)

It was not so long ago that we couldn't guarantee an "approximately equal" sign would be legible between any computer users. YAY! HTML. And Unicode.

[luzula]

In Swedish it is a "tilde"!

I just copy-pasted the ≈ from another website; I do not know how to produce it otherwise. : )

[susanreads]

I don't know how to type it, but in HTML I'd try & asymp ; (without the spaces), let's try ... ≈ (if that works it's from https://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html)

[luzula]

Cool! In LaTex it is \approx.

[azurelunatic]

In addition to using it as an approximation, I use it in place of the handwave I'd use in person. Which handwave it is depends on context. Sometimes it's sarcastic. Sometimes it's emphatic.

[jesse_the_k]

So it's a ~handwave~ ?

[cxcvi]

That's more like waving of tentacles.

[azurelunatic]

:D :D :D

[isis]

Sounds like an interesting book - and I'd never seen the worldcat website before but how cool is that! (Alas it tells me that it's not available at my local libraries, but I can ILL it, yay.)

Also, I just did a Goodreads search for it (to add it to my to-read shelf) and it wasn't found. After searching on just the words before the colon, I found it - because the title there uses 'Pernickety' rather than 'Persnickety'. Which is also what is on the cover, at least in the illustrations, and Google tells me that's a British variation. Which makes sense considering your comment above about the occasional usage clash!

[jesse_the_k]

Isn't Worldcat great? I can't speak to how comprehensive it is, although I've seen listings for libraries in Europe and NZ. It's the perfect tool for ILLs (which my public library also provides, but they call them "outer library loans" which does make sense).

PERNICKETY! I love it.

Perfectly meta comment on perfectly meta book.

[staranise]

Oooh, I love David Crystal. The Stories of English changed my entire perspective on grammar and prescriptivism.

I'm used to the wave dash as used in Japanese and imported into anime and manga fandom, where it's a sign that the last vowel of a word is elongated in a cute or funny way (like "it's so good to see yooou~") and pronounced with a kind of singsong. So from there, I kind of see it used to mark things said in a singsongy voice. Like, if I said "the tree" that's one thing, The Tree means it's obviously important and official, but ~the tree~ means it's believed by someone, but probably not me, to hold special symbolic or emotional significance. Which is easily transmuted into a way to denote sarcasm. ~I'm just being sarcastic~

[jesse_the_k]

Ahhhhhh ANIME!

I knew the ~word~ Usage has to start somewhere, and anime -> general Tumblr fandom is a short trip.

Thanks for the first entry on my "more David Crystal list."