I’ve been mulling over the relationship between the spoken and the written quite a bit recently, along the lines of a blog I posted ages ago about how children learn to read. And I’ve just come across the latest New Yorker, a 90th-anniversary special, which contains the ruminations of Mary Norris, a copy-editor at the journal for many decades. ‘An editor once called us prose goddesses; another description might be comma queens’.

Norris is particularly interested in the comma, and in the ‘serial comma’ or ‘Oxford comma’, the comma that comes before ‘and’ in a list of three or more things. ‘My favourite cereals are Cheerios, Raisin Bran, and Shredded Wheat’. She cites some cases where the serial comma really does resolve ambiguities (‘This book is dedicated to my parents, Ayn Rand and God’), although she suspects that it is going to disappear, along with lots of other punctuation, as communication becomes ever more rapid, engagement more cursory. Norris remains maximalist about her punctuation:

‘Suppose you’re not in a hurry. Suppose you move your lips when you read, or pronounce every word aloud in your head, and you’re reading a Victorian novel or a history of Venice. You have plenty of time to crunch commas. … I remain loyal to the serial comma, because it actually does sometimes prevent ambiguity and because I’ve gotten used to the way it looks. It gives starch to prose, and can be very effective. If a sentence were a picket fence, the serial commas would be posts at regular intervals’.

Starched prose, picket-fence prose–I like these attempts to grasp at the difference that punctuation makes. Also the idea that the density of punctuation has something to do with the pace of reading, and the degree of verbalization or aural engagement. Or is this just a false nostalgia? Whatever it is, Norris’s piece is a lovely tribute to a profession that is not mere harmless drudgery, but ‘draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, Midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey’.

Roughly a century ago, T. J. Cobden-Sanderson marked the end of the Doves Press by throwing the beautiful typeface that he had created into the River Thames. Inspired by the example of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press, and modelled on type created in Venice in the 1470s, the font had been used to print works by Shakespeare and Milton, as well as a five-volume Bible.

Now, remarkably, an enthusiast for the Doves typeface, who had already gone to the trouble of creating a digital version, has gone fishing for the font, and has recovered  no fewer than 150 pieces from their watery bed in the Thames. You can read the full story here.

Here is another entry in our (very occasional!) series of gravestone errata: the memorial stone of Godfrey Washington (1670-1729), who was the great-uncle of the first President of the USA, George Washington. This stone is mounted on the north wall of the parish church of St Mary the Less in Cambridge, where Washington is buried, having been Vicar, and Fellow and Bursar of the neighbouring Peterhouse. The stone attracts a fair number of pilgrims, who note the eagle, stars, and stripes of the Washington coat of arms, from which the emblem and flag of the USA are said to derive. On closer inspection, however, there is apparent confusion over the year in which he died:

What is the story behind this error? Is it really a careless mistake on the part of the stone carver, who perhaps lost concentration as he reached the end of his work? (Compare the story of American author Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose gravestone proclaimed him winner of the 1978 ‘Noble’ Prize for Literature…). There’s something especially surprising about errors and corrections in gravestone inscriptions. As texts, they are literally monumental and often sacred sites, and our expectations of their permanence and finality make any errors and corrections stand out as particularly affronting.