Afternoon all!
Let us not forget that a mere three hundred and forty years ago, punctuation was standardized and consisted of the main tools we still use today. The printing of the Christian Bible was catalytic to that, which is ridiculous, considering that Hebrew and Aramaic contain no punctuation and no vowels. Punctuation, in this case, has given rise to many divisions and sects. Consider this pivotal verse: “Truly, truly, I say unto you[color=red], today you will be with me in Paradise.” If the comma is placed elsewhere, it completely alters the meaning and intent of the verse and along with it, an entire theological paradigm.
“Truly, Truly, I say unto you today[color=red], you will be with me in Paradise.”
In one verse you’re going straight to Heaven, while in the other, there’s no time specified, so the thief on the cross was only assured that he’d be in Heaven one day, perhaps after the second resurrection, three thousand years from when the promise was made.
We can see the importance of punctuation when the placement of a simple comma can change so much.
That said, how punctuation should be utilized is greatly dependant upon what one is attempting to convey. There is writing and then there’s writing. What one would write for the New York Times is not what one would pen in a novel. Most novels consist of between seventy-five and ninety per cent (horrors) dialogue. Prepositions at the end of a sentence in dialogue are as common as fragmented sentences. We simply do not speak in the same way in which we write.
I have a problem with reading too many which’s in a document, and that can’t be avoided if one wishes to dispose of end of sentence prepositions entirely. Writing is meant to be read and understood, preferably with some level of enjoyment afforded the reader. Most readers don’t care (or even know) if you’ve misplaced a comma (grammatically speaking) or used a preposition at the end of a sentence.
If we were to conduct a study of people who read often, I’m guessing that a good percentage of those readers wouldn’t be able to tell us what a preposition is, let alone where it should be placed. I base this on the polls done recently of self-professed daily Bible readers, twelve per cent of whom believe that Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. Sixty-eight per cent of the thousands of born-again Christians polled didn’t know what John 3:16 says and eighty-six percent of them didn’t know who delivered the Sermon on the Mount.
Let’s face it; education ain’t what it used to be. Despite the natural evolution of languages, the herd is demonstrably ignorant of the rules of grammar. It isn’t surprising. As an experiment, I put the subtitle option on the television while we watched several movies recently. That’s where the vast majority of the public is getting its education and it is appalling! Television, which I seldom watch, is even worse.
As a Christian Fiction writer, I pay attention to trends and allow for dialectical changes in root words. At the end of the day, there’s no other option left than to admit that the general populace is woefully ignorant of the correct usage of the English language.
Our youngest daughter attends a high-end Christian University where the bar is supposedly set dauntingly high (it’s referred to as “the Christian Harvard”), yet third-year students there routinely put a comma in front of the word because and make other similar errors. Go figure! $24,000 a year in tuition and they know almost nothing about grammar, and the sad part is, their teachers either don’t notice this, or don’t care.
Shalom aleikhem - Jesse.
