I have always wanted to make love to a woman with punctuational nomenclature

Who, one wonders, edited this fine book? Who set its hot hot type in the firmament and made it twinkle?  Some one or ones crazy, that's who. We with eyes to see can observe the following things:

• Colons are used indiscriminately where commas, semicolons, periods or dashes would be more appropriate.
• Colons are also used where no punctuation whatever would be more appropriate.
• Semicolons are used where commas or periods, or again no punctuation at all, would be more appropriate.
• Periods, commas and exclamation points follow hard on the letter they precede, but a space always precedes colons, semicolons, question marks and punctuation marks.  This sometimes leads to sequences in which, after the final letter of the last word quoted, there's a space, then a closing quotation mark, then a space, then a colon, then a space (sometimes two), and then the beginning of the next word: '' blah '' : said so-and-so.
• Although the quotation marks are double (and are clearly composed of just two single marks placed side by side), the spelling is British.

This book is going to drive me mad. The only thing that can be said in its credit is that the use of commas is pretty solid, but that's probably only because the translator evidently feels that the colon is the default punctuation, and will spice up any stretch of prose nicely.

Comments

[bitchphd]

What; you, don't think: that punctuation, is a toy?!?!

[ben wolfson]

I suppose it could have been worse.

[apostropher]

the translator evidently feels that the colon is the default punctuation

And we all know how you and yours feel about that.

[ben wolfson]

Maybe I should change the tag up there from "nescire aude" to "the pre-eminent cock theorist of our time". I'd probably get tons more google hits.

[John Emerson]

Blame Croce. Blame Vico. Cultural differences.