Punk Jew-Asian tales

By Randy Koch

Lucy Liu and Adam Sandler’s tattooed and mohawked love child was spotted last night at a posh Hollywood night spot. When cornered and asked why his famous parents had kept his existence a secret for over 15 years, he loosed a stream of slang and expletives which, interpreted with the help of a street-smart translator, amounted to this: "That was my bloody choice. Who wants to be known as the son of a Charlie’s Angel and Little Nicky, the son of the devil?" In another unrelated story, Johnny Rotten’s new international band is on the last two legs of a moderately anticipated world tour. On Wednesday, they’ll perform near the newest band members’ homes: a kibbutz outside of Haifa, Israel, and then over the weekend small venues in Katmandu, Nepal; Ulan Bator, Mongolia; and P’yongyang, North Korea. No one expects them to return to Londonderry, England, any time soon.
All right, I admit it -- this isn’t about punk Jew-Asians. I feared that if you knew the actual subject of this article, you’d flip the page. My apologies for misleading you, but introductions to dull subjects sometimes call for desperate measures. If I haven’t overly insulted your intelligence or your sense of political correctness, I hope you’ll join me in a closer look at (say it fast) punk-jew-asian, punc-jew-asian, punc-chew-ashun, punc-tu-ation.
With good reason, I prefer one mark to all others. Period. It’s the one that makes writing with a pencil a joy, the one that -- when I reach the end of a sentence in which I outline my disgust with the tasteless, sexist ads in one local paper’s sports section -- I can pound home with a thud, a splintering of graphite, and a shattering of yellow-painted wood. The British call it the stop (I can hear the voice-over in Monty Python’s Flying Circus warning, "And now for something completely different," and then the punctuated introduction, "Thee Stop"), but I’m disappointed that they chose this mundane road-sign label. The American "period" is too flabby with its three syllables rather than a short, abrupt word. And while Carlos Flores suggests "death," a term he considers more Mexican, I’m partial to something less morbid, something sharper and more physical, like "bolt."
I like the idea of telling students who write run-ons and comma splices, "Bolt down that clause." Maybe the word would make them feel there’s something substantial to be done and enthusiastically search for the end of a sentence instead of letting it flop around in the wind like a kite that’s wrested itself from a child’s hand. Regardless of its name, I’m grateful that the U.S. Postal Service made periods in abbreviations for states obsolete. What joy was there in that little dot after those chopped-off names? Give me a firm, resolute, direct statement, however, and I will -- with pleasure -- pound home the point by ending with a lead-shattering, tablet-tearing period.
Nothing should be easier than deciding where a question mark goes. Right? Usually it’s obvious, but special circumstances involving quotation marks or questions within questions often puzzle even fairly experienced writers. Generally speaking, put the question mark inside the quotation marks if the question mark applies to what’s inside the quotation marks. For example, I asked, "Where do I put the question mark in this sentence?" In this case, it belongs inside the quotation marks since the question is also inside. However, where does the question mark go if I say, "Punctuating sentences is really quite easy"? Here a statement appears inside the quotation marks, but the question appears outside, so we place the question mark after the quotation marks.
On the other hand, when we have questions within questions, things appear a little trickier, but take note of the power of a single question mark. Consider this sentence, which contains three questions and two different sets of quotation marks: Yesterday did I hear you ask Miguel, "Did José really read Ed Wehde’s article ‘Do You Know the Way to San José?’" Rather than piling up several question marks, one for each of the three questions in this sentence, one will suffice for all of them. Think like a mathematician here; I call this principle the Distributive Property of Question Marks, wherein the power of a single question mark is distributed across one or more questions in a single sentence. It’s the equivalent of this mathematical equation -- [6 + (6/3)]·2 -- wherein 2, which appears outside the brackets, is multiplied across the entire quantity inside the brackets. In our sentence, even though the question mark appears inside the quotation marks, it applies to the questions both inside and outside of the quotation marks.
More thoughtful -- though less attractive -- is the semicolon. This hybrid, a cross between a comma and a period and with the stature of a colon, is a tentative glyph -- wanting to bring things to a halt but unwilling or unable to act decisively. Like its father, the period, it wants to stop; like its mother, the comma, it’s bent on going on, and so it finds itself burdened with tasks that no other punctuation mark is willing to take on. Most commonly, it joins complete thoughts that are logically related; the movement from one to the other occurs in the reader’s mind without the assistance of language. On occasion, however, the semicolon lends a hand in complicated lists where individual elements contain commas, and semicolons mark the end of one element and the beginning of another. Consider, for example, this sentence: I had good intentions of quitting after these brief, discursive examinations of the bold, manly period; the curvaceous question mark; and the less decisive, unattractive semicolon; however, our writing lives are filled with other even more interesting notations.
The apostrophe -- that comma filled with helium, that fly fisherman’s hook dangled above the surface of a sentence, that Boy Scout who pulls the "not" taut, the tempter of those who would make "it" possessive -- delights in causing confusion. Like the semicolon, its -- not "it’s," which always equals "it is" -- lower class cousin, the apostrophe holds down two regular jobs: forming the possessive of singular and plural nouns (Jesse’s girl, the people’s court, the Cantús’ house) and contracting words by taking the place of a missing letter (’twas, wasn’t, aren’t, etc.), several letters (I’d, she’d, you’ve, etc.), or numbers (Class of ’03 or a ’57 Chevy). Occasionally it moonlights by working with s to form the plural of letters, numbers and words as it does here: A lipogramme is a novel that contains no e’s.
E-mail has made shortcuts like emoticons popular and probably quadrupled the average person’s use of the colon. While it bears a remarkable resemblance to a reclining person’s eyes, it’s frequently misused. People often place a colon immediately after a linking verb, but they are: wrong. Likewise, those who place it after a transitive verb deny: that they, too, are WRONG! Yes, most people know how to use it in indications of time (10:25 p.m.), after a salutation in a formal letter (Dear Mr. Letterman:), or between a main title and a subtitle (Martha Stewart: The Sellebrity’s Inside Buyography). However, few people seem aware that an independent clause (no, not Santa without a corporate sponsor but a group of words that can stand alone as a sentence) must precede the colon. The colon also points to a logical connection between the independent clause and whatever follows it: a word, a phrase, a clause, or even another sentence. Permit me to offer some advice: if colons trouble you, don’t assume that a colonoscopy will solve your problems.
Next, please, follow me down this short hall. I know it’s dark; stay close. Here we are. Allow me to open the quotation marks so that we can step inside. No, don’t worry about closing them; we’ll do that when we get to the other end, but first let’s look around. We can’t put just anything here; this space is reserved for some very specific information. First, quotation marks contain dialogue, or the words spoken by characters in a story. Did you say, "This is fascinating"? I’m glad you think so. Second, we use quotation marks to indicate language that we’ve quoted directly from an outside source when writing a documented paper. And third, according to "Quotation Marks," a chapter in Karen Elizabeth Gordon’s The Well-Tempered Sentence: A Punctuation Handbook for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, "quotation marks also enclose titles of short stories and poems, chapters, essays, articles, television and radio programs, and short musical compositions" (81). Why yes, this space can accomodate a variety of things. This concludes our brief tour. Watch your step as you leave, and yes, I have, indeed, already closed the quotation marks.
Unless you want to sound like a pubescent girl excited that Nick, the no-neck star of the high school football team, grunted three inaudible words at you, you will use exclamation points rarely and with discretion. Occasionally you’ll need one when writing dialogue (Mr. Bly yelled, "Don’t you use that tone with me, young man!"), but you should almost never use an exclamation point in formal or academic writing or in the narrative of a story since emotion must be conveyed with language and content, not with punctuation. Also, notice in the above example about Mr. Bly where the exclamation point is placed and that the same rules that applied to question marks with quotation marks also apply to exclamation points with quotation marks. If at this point you’re inclined to write this sentence -- I have never been so excited about punctuation in my life -- I won’t criticize you at all for placing one (or even two or three) exclamation points after it.
Many people think that commas are like salt and pepper, seasoning to be sprinkled into a manuscript according to taste. "I haven’t used one in several sentences," they argue, "so I must need one here." Then they further justify their decision by saying, "It felt like a pause was needed" or "The reader needed a chance to catch his breath." Commas are neither a condiment nor breathing directions; they are, instead, tools for making the meaning of language clear and, as such, the most used, abused, and misunderstood member of the punctuation family. Take, for example, this sentence which uses a coordinating conjunction, the most common tool in English for joining independent clauses: "The stag party was attended by my best friends and my future mother-in-law stayed home to watch Touched by an Angel reruns." Notice how the absence of the comma midway through the sentence could easily provoke a heart attack in someone unprepared for the mother-in-law’s presence at the party. A simple comma before the conjunction "and" will spare your reader unnecessary ambulance and hospital bills by preventing any possible misreading of the sentence.
Similarly, an appropriately used comma with a subordinate clause (subordinating conjunctions being the second most popular connector in English) will also prevent your readers from jumping to wrong conclusions. Consider this sentence without a comma: "When I took a picture of Laura Winchester stood behind her and picked his nose." Notice how a comma after the introductory subordinate clause can prevent readers from getting confused halfway through the sentence and having to reread it: "When I took a picture of Laura, Winchester stood behind her and picked his nose." If the clause isn’t introductory, the comma isn’t necessary and still no confusion results: "Winchester stood behind Laura and picked his nose when I took a picture of her."
Relative clauses, however, pose a different kind of challenge to writers trying to punctuate their sentences. The absence of commas can change the information in a relative clause from supplementary to mandatory material. If you are a man, the use of commas in the following sentence will be of particular interest to you: "Women are attracted to men who are fascinated with punctuation." This sentence means that women are only attracted to those men who are fascinated with punctuation. A comma, however, makes a world of difference here. If I say, "Women are attracted to men, who are fascinated with punctuation," I mean that women are attracted to all men; plus, I’ve included some bonus material about men -- they are all fascinated with punctuation -- which may or may not have anything to do with their popularity with women. If you’re a man, commas here will likely help you decide if you should spend more time studying this article.
Commas are also necessary in a variety of other places, most of which people are familiar with -- between the items in a list, after a greeting in a personal letter, between an attribution and the words spoken in dialogue, between a city and state in an address, between a conjunctive adverb and the independent clause to which it’s connected, etc. No, commas aren’t needed with a hamburger and pickles but they are with a hamburger, pickles, lettuce, and tomato. Be a connoisseur of commas; better yet, be a commassieur.
I could go on, of course, with great relish, but I’ll spare you the other desperate measures to which I’d resort in order to keep you interested. I won’t impose any more puns on you or dream that my comments are punctuated with your laughter. I will only bid you farewell, trusting you’ve gained by my digressions but regretting that I did not introduce you to -- oh, the tragedy! -- the dash, to the multi-talented hyphen, or to ellipses. . . .

(Randy Koch teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Texas A&M International University.)

Local Writers at Work
An open-mike reading was held at El Café del Barrio on Friday, January 24. While the turnout was small, the works and ideas exchanged were big. Thanks again to Raquel Valle Sentíes for opening her home to us.

Congratulations to TAMIU professor and poet Dr. Suzette Bishop, whose manuscript She Took Off Her Wings and Shoes, recently won The May Swenson Poetry Award, sponsored by Utah State University Press. Nationally known poet Alicia Ostriker selected her manuscript from 800 entries. Dr. Bishop’s book will be published by Utah State University Press, and she will receive $1,000 and royalties. Ostriker will write a foreword for the book, scheduled to be published by this summer.