98 YEARS OLD AND STILL QUESTIONING QUESTIONS...

AYOUNG lady just emailed me beginning with the sentence, “I hope you are well?” I rang her up at once, of course, and demanded to know why she had begun her message in such a way.

“I was enquiring about your health,” she said. “I hope you are well.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s my point. Are you enquiring, or aren’t you? If you are simply asserting that you hope I am well, then putting a question mark after expressing that hope is incorrect.

If, on the other hand, you are enquiring about my health, your question should adopt an interrogative form such as ‘ Are you well?’ or ‘ How is your health?’ You cannot just say you hope I am well and stick a question mark after it.”

“What if,” she said, “I am making a statement in an interrogative tone of voice as I must have had in my mind’s ear when formulating the email?”

“I believe you are talking here,” I said disapprovingly, “of Antipodean Questioning Intonation, also known as High Rise Terminal, which is the term used to describe the modern tendency among some to turn spoken sentences up at the end in the Australian fashion, as though asking for approval or reassurance.

“It’s bad enough doing that in the spoken language but trying to transfer it to written English with a question mark is totally unjustifiable.”

“I was only saying politely that I hoped you were well, and the question mark was my way of seeking reassurance on that matter,” she said.

“I hope everyone is well,” I said. “I also hope that they are happy, financially comfortable, in full- time employment or education and content with their lot but I don’t send them all emails saying so, let alone sticking question marks at the end.

“Henry Fowler, in the first edition of his Dictionary of Modern English Usage in 1926, pointed out, in a section on Question Marks: ‘ The chief danger is that of forgetting that whether a set of words is a question or not, and consequently requires or repudiates the question mark, is decided not by its practical effect or sense, but by its grammatical form and relations.’

“This, it seems to me, makes it abundantly clear that the sentence ‘ I hope you are well’ being of indicative and not interrogative form, cannot under any circumstances justify being adorned with a question mark.”

Silence came from the other end of the line, so I expanded on the subject. “The new edition of Fowler, edited by Jeremy Butterfield, incidentally, omits the entry on STOPS in which the above ruling appears, instead directing readers to the sections on Apostrophe, Brackets, Comma etc. Yet when we look up ‘ Question Mark’ the sound advice given above is not to be found.”

There was still a silence on the other end of the line and I realised that she must have hung up some time ago. I was on the point of sending her an email saying that I hoped she was well, when I received one from her, repeating the earlier message, but without the troublesome question mark. Such corrections restore one’s faith in human nature.