“The Punctuationalists can go hyphenate themselves.”
That is the latest salvo from my ever-ending brainchew of a concept I don’t think there will ever be time enough to articulate.
In this saga-agas I see a school of wordfulness where, for no useful or justifiable reason, students are taught skills and techniques for identifying the True Center of a word or phrase.
“True Center” is demonstrated most simply with a word of odd-numbered letters. The True Center of the 5-letter word “CHEAT” is easily identified as E, the middle letter.
Words of even-numbered letters present challenges. Even-lettered words begin the process of training young minds in the skills of finding True Center in words that at first might not appear to have one. (There is only one… or is there…?)
A word like “THEIRS” would seem to fall perilously short of possessing a True Center until the student fills in the middle letters that stuff all words with hidden alphabetical effluvia.
The letters between E and I, the letters which share the middle spot of “THEIRS”, are F G and H. This makes the True Center of THEIRS G, since it is the middle letter between the two middle letters E and I.
Repeat after me: The True Center of THEIRS is G.
The young, untrained brain can ache and quietly yawp when confronted with a word like EVACUATION. The middle letters here are U and A, confronting us not only with two middle letters in non-alphabetical order but also with a desperately lengthy span of letters between them.
Those letters, of course, are T S R Q P O N M L K J I H G F E D C and B. Phew.
The mental gymnastics of arriving at LK as the imperfect True Center of EVACUATION seem impossible at first but, through thorough and rigorous training, the student’s mind will become limber and lithe at identifying it before the blink of an eye can occur. Finding True Center, how perfect or imperfect, will become as simple as taking a breath.
Among those involved in the inevitable debate about how to interpret and arrive at True Center at the Punctuationalists, whose contribution to the discussion of finding True Center of full sentences suggest we include commas and semicolons in the breakdown of a string of letters and words.
The Punctuationalists believe True Center of a phrase like “EAT, SLEEP, BREATHE” would be the first E in the word SLEEP, with the first comma filling the 4th character of the phrase.
The Punctuationalists non-universal exclusion of the spaces between the words is also a source of controversy. That’s for a more elaborate discussion, and a diversion that contributes to my belief that this “School” could never be fully articulated or expressed by one individual.
At any rate, the opening line of this ramble comes from the mouth of what I provisionally refer to as a “Purist” who believes punctuation, lacking a definitive sequence of order, has no place in determining True Center, since there is no True Center to be found. In punctuational lore we do not have a specific order such as Comma, Period, Colon, Semi-Colon. There may be some assumed order of things with the Colon and the Semi-Colon, or the Hyphen and the Emdash. But really there is no standardized order of punctuation. We never recited them in school. Or did I just black out that memory?
“The Punctuationalists can go hyphenate themselves” is the withering dismissal of a Purist who discards all punctuation in their search for True Center. I thought of other punctuation marks to substitute “hyphenate” in this disdainful wisp of dismissiveness. They can go “open quote themselves” is awkward, with its dangling lack of closed quote. They can go “Ampersand” themselves sounds like a takes-one-to-know-one kind of insult.
“Hyphenate themselves” is, I think perfect. It says absolutely nothing, conforming to the æsthetic of uselessness that and futility that is essential to the very concept of True Center.
