Pico Lyer/皮科·埃尔

The gods, they say, give breath, and they take it away. But the samesaid-could be said-could itnot?-of the humble comma. Add it to the present clause, and, all of a sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprivedof a resting place. Yet still the comma gets no respea. It seems just a slip of a thing, apedant's tick, a blip on the edge of our consciousness, a kind of printer's smudge almost. Small, we claim, is beautiful (especially in the age of the microchip). Yet what is so often used, and so rarely called, as the comma-unless it be breath itself?

Punctuation, one is taught, has a point: to keep up law and order. Punctuation marks are theroad signs placed along the highway of our communication——to control speeds，providedirections and prevent head-on collisions. A period has the unblinking finality of a red light, the comma is a flashing yellow light that asks us only to slow down, and the semicolon is astop sign that tells us to ease gradually to a halt, before gradually starting up again. Byestablishing the relations between words, punctuation establishes the relations between thepeople using words. That may be one reason why school teachers exalt it and lovers defy it("we love each other and belong to each other let’s don’t ever hurt each other Nicole let's don'tever hurt each other,” wrote Gary Gilmore to his girlfriend )A comma ，he must have known, "separate inseparables" ，in the clinching words of H. W. Fowler, King of English Usage.

人都说神仙把气赐予生灵，又把气夺走。不过这话用在小小的逗号上，何尝不是如此？给现在这句加上逗号，脑子里真会，突然，停下来想想；若随意去掉，或忘了它，就剥夺了脑子休息的空间。尽管如此，逗号仍然不受人算重。它似乎只是一个小撇，书呆子手下的一个小点儿，是我们意识边缘上的一个记号，甚至排字工人沾上的一点污。我们好说以小为美（尤其在这集成电路时代）。然而，还有什么东西是像逗号那样频频使用而又那样默默无闻的呢？——不就是气吗？

我们都学过，标点有一个目的：维持法律与秩序。标点符号正是我们交通要道上一路设置的路标——用以控制速度，指示方向，避免迎头相撞。句号具有红灯的一丝不苟，说一不二；逗号是一闪一闪的黄灯，要求我们只是放慢速度；分号则是停车标记，指示我们缓缓煞车，然后再缓缓启动标点建立起词与词之间的关系，从而建立起用词人之间的关系。教师捧它，情人烦它，其原因盖出于此。（盖瑞·基尔摩尔给女友写道：“我爱你你爱我我是你的你是我的我们永远谁也别伤谁的心科尔我们永远谁也别伤谁的心。”）他一定学过英语惯用法大王福勒的断言：逗号是“把不可分开的东西分开”。

Punctuation, then, is a civic prop, a pillar that holds society upright. (A run on sentence, itsphrases piling up without division, is as unsightly as a sink piled high with dirty dishes.)Smallwonder,then,that punctuation was one of the first proprieties of the Victorian age, the age ofthe corset, that the modernists threw off the sexual revolution might be said to have begunwhen Joyce's Molly Bloomis spilled out all her private thoughts in 36 pages of unbridled, almostunperioded and officially censored prose: and another are bellion was surely marked whenE.E.Cummings first felt free to commit "God" to the lower case.

Punctuation thus becomes the signatrire of cultures. The hot-blooded Spaniard seems to berevealed in the passion and urgency of his doubled exclamation points and question marks ( "iCaramba! LQuien sabe?"), while the impassive Chinese traditionally added to his so-calledinscrutability by omitting directions from his ideograms. The anarchy and commotion of the60s were given voice in the exploding exclamation marks, riotous capital letters and Day-Gloitalics of Tom Wolfe's spray-paint prose; and in Communist societies, where the State isabsolute, the dignity-and divinity-of capital letters is reserved for Ministries, Sub-Committees and Secretariats.

如此说来，标点乃是百姓的支柱，是支撑社会不至于垮掉的栋梁冗长的句子，词组堆砌成赘而不分彼此，就好比洗碗槽堆满了脏碗，很不雅观。）也难怪在维多利亚时代，风行紧身胸衣的时代，标点是讲礼貌的头等大事，而现代派一概弃之门外。性的革命可以说就是始于乔伊斯笔下的莫莉·布鲁姆，她将全部私衷一吐为快，洋洋36页文字信口道来，几乎没有句号，遭到官家查禁。再就是卡明斯，肯定也算造反，他当初为所欲为，擅自将"God"贬为小写。

于是，标点成了不同文化的标志。西班牙人性好激动，打惊叹号打问号都用双重的（“jCaramba! LQuiensabe?”见鬼啦！谁能明白？）情真意切，如见其人；中国人则不好动声色，表意字的文言自古就不注标点，所谓胸有城府，益见其深。汤姆·沃尔夫那种喷漆式的散文体，惊叹号一哄而起，大写字母泛滥成灾，斜体字像是涂了荧光漆，无不表达了60年代的无法无天和乱作一团；而在共产党当政的社会，国家至上，大写字母的尊严——与神威——只留给政府各部委和书记处享用。