An English professor wrote the words:

‘A woman without her man is nothing’ on the chalkboard and asked his students to punctuate it correctly*.

All of the males in the class wrote:

‘A woman, without her man, is nothing.’

All the females in the class wrote:

‘A woman: without her, man is nothing.’

I’ve been planning to write a post on the importance of spelling and punctuation for a while, and this has spurred me on to get it written and posted, so stay tuned!

But until then…

As I read and re-read this anecdote, I got thinking about how we punctuate not just our writing, but also our speech. How would you speak both of the above lines to convey the meaning of their written punctuation? Try speaking both out loud to someone and see if they can grasp the different meanings you’re trying to get across.

OK! Technical stuff coming up!

The key lies in emphasising specific morphemes**,  where to put pauses and how long to pause. It’s got to be perfect, like comic timing, for it to work.

When we speak a polysyllabic word, we can emphasise whatever morpheme or syllable we choose to change the importance of what part of the word we are speaking. It can even change the meaning of an entire phrase, sentence, or diatribe.

The simplistic beauty of this is that the meaning of the word as a whole remains intact, but that meaning is altered subtly but powerfully by what morpheme we choose to emphasise.

This is a very strong force in speech. Whether we write or speak, to quote Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars when about to enter a dangerous scenario, “we must be cautious.”

*The use of the word “correctly” in this anecdote is interesting. There is no correct punctuation unless we know the context of the sentence. Without context, it’s entirely open to interpretation.

**A morpheme is a part of a word, often a syllable, that has meaning and also forms a part of a word. I couldn’t be bothered thinking up my own example, so here’s an explanation I’ve adapted from Wikipedia:

The word “unbreakable” has three morphemes: “un”, “break”, and “able”. Each one has a different meaning, but when put together in this order forms a new word.

“See it all, till tomorrow”