If we act now, we can still save the question mark
This being the Age of Monstrous Intractable Problems, which I just named officially right there, it is vital that we occasionally focus on a trivial annoyance we might actually be able to eradicate in due course.
And if not, so what? Nobody cared in the first place.
This is purely a mental health exercise to reconnect with the idea of accomplishment, however modest, in the hope of girding one’s brain for the quotidian allotment of Monstrous Intractable Problems.
Today’s trivial protagonist is the question mark, and the question about the question mark is your basic two- part question. Why aren’t people putting question marks where they belong? And, less frequently but more ominously, why are people putting question marks where they don’t belong? If two- part questions were mistakenly allotted three parts, part three in this case would be, who could possibly give a fig about the misappropriation of just one player on the entire punctuation roster?
That answer to part three, of course, is me.
This might come as a shock to my editors, who probably hold in low regard my aptitude for capable punctuation as it is, but I assure
them it’s not from apathy. I care deeply about punctuation, and yes, it’s quite burdensome.
Most people can look at the W. B. Mason Strike Zone on the Pirates telecasts and only get annoyed when what appear to be obvious strikes are getting called balls by the umpire, and vice versa, but I’m annoyed before a single pitch is thrown because W. B. Mason, the official office supply company of the Pirates and eight other Major League teams, has never bothered to put a question mark in the advertising slogan it’s been pushing since 1986: Who But W. B. Mason.
There is simply no point in wondering Who But W. B. Mason would present an advertising slogan that is obviously a direct question without including a question mark, because the answer is depressingly obvious: plenty of people.
The producers of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” to name just one group of offenders, as well as the producers of “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and of “What Just Happened” and of “Who’s That Girl,” and of “How Do You Know,” all big- time film projects that make you wonder how people with enough brains to make a movie do not know when to deploy a humble question mark.
But Hollywood purports to have an alibi on this. In some pockets of the movie biz, the question mark is considered bad luck, and is excluded from titles purposely, not from ignorance. This would hold up if it weren’t for “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” and for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and even for “Dude, Where’s My Car?” which somehow made some $ 70 million without anyone having to wonder, “Dude, Where’s My Question Mark?”
In 1982, Margaux Hemingway wound up in a film titled, “They Call Me Bruce?” which required no question mark but got one anyway. The 1987 sequel, “They Still Call Me Bruce,” also required no question mark and, somewhat surprisingly, didn’t get one.
The originating punctuator of the question mark- for- no- evidentreason caper was apparently none other than Francis Scott Key, who put one at the end of the first verse of the Star Spangled Banner, which, in written form, ends
Oh, say does that star- spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
The explanation for this, at least the one from the scholars at the National Museum of American History, is that the rockets’ red glare and the bombs bursting in air “aren’t just poetic flourishes — they were actual bombs and rockets being fired upon Baltimore’s Fort McHenry on the night of September 13, 1814, as the fate of a young nation hung in the balance. Francis Scott Key had secured the release of an American prisoner of war, but was held behind the British fleet arrayed in Baltimore harbor until after the attack on the Fort. He was powerless to do anything but watch as the British bombarded the American forces. The first stanza of the Star- Spangled Banner captures the mix of fear, patriotism, and anxiety that Key felt throughout the long rainy night of the battle. Does that Star- Spangled Banner yet wave? Would he have a country to return home to?”
Fair enough; nevertheless, Key’s mistake was not putting the question mark in parentheses (?) to indicate conjecture or uncertainty. Still, his respect for the question mark was profound, and refreshingly, nobody cares, least of all Key.
In post- modern America, the lack of respect for the question mark is culture- wide, not limited to advertising and Hollywood. If Fox News cared about this, it could declare The War On The Question Mark, but that would run the risk of angering the president, a self- professed smart person who often tweets without question marks, grammar, correct spelling, constraint, knowledge, shame, manners, but wait, again, let’s stick to trivial annoyances rather than Monstrous Intractable Problems.
The worst indignity visited upon the question mark happens every night on “Jeopardy!” specifically Final Jeopardy, the climactic moment when contestants are required to write their answers in the form of a question, but somehow are not required to use a question mark at the end of it! What Is The Ottoman Empire. “And that is the correct answer and what did you wager?” Alex Trebek will say. What he won’t ever say is, “Oh, I’m sorry, every answer on ‘ Jeopardy!’ must be in the form of a question and when I went to school, all questions were followed with a question mark. You may go home and live the remainder of your life in shame.”
If “Jeopardy!” is not going to insist on correct punctuation, what chance do the rest of us have?