Theory of Punctuation

Laurie Anderson. Homeland "Another Day in America"

And by the way here's my theory of punctuation. Instead of a period at the end of each sentence there should be a tiny clock that shows you how long it took you to write that sentence.

Notice the subtle pronoun shift from a speaking I to an addressed you. And the responsibility of the sentence creation is off-loaded to the reader. Read/write become synonymous.

And we can bring to the fore the Irish influence. Refer to Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West by M.B. Parkes [see page 23]. The Irish in adopting Christianity pursued a vigorous study of the Latin language. They tended to regard Latin as primarily a written or "visible" language. And introduced innovations in the display of texts.

These graphic conventions were derived from the processes by which the Irish had acquired their knowledge of the Latin language. They relied heavily on the works of ancient grammarians, which were based upon the perception of the word as an isolable linguistic phenomenon, and employed morphological criteria to establish a set of word-classes (which the grammarians called 'parts of speech'). When Irish scribes copied Latin texts they soon abandoned the script continua which they had found in their exemplars. Instead they adopted as the basis for their scribal practices the morphological criteria which they had encountered in the analysis of the grammarians: they set out the parts of speech by introducing spaces between words.

Someneattrick!

And so for day 1446
28.11.2010