Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

unless your school principle says so
Without full stops, that already difficult paragraph degenerates into virtual incomprehensibility. Even
worse. Are the full. Stops that are placed. At the end of things that. Are not sentences. The jerky effect
that causes is most disconcerting and again meaning tends to vanish.
Perhaps the most abused punctuation symbol is the apostrophe. There are those who claim it is an
archaic irrelevance and they would like to get rid of it completely. However removing the apostrophe
from our written language would greatly increase our homonym list -- how would you distinguish, for
example, between "were" and "we're" without it?
The apostrophe indicates missing letters in contractions ("should've") or the possessive ("Alan's book").
A case can be made that even when used as a possessive it really indicates missing letters. An older
form of the language would have written "Alan his book". Confusion arises when the word is already a
possessive (as in "its book" which does not require an apostrophe) or a homonym with missing letters
as in "it's a book" (i.e. "it is a book").
Putting a full stop at the end of a sentence presupposes that you know what a sentence is. The
structure of a language (its grammar) defines this sort of thing and in English it can be a slippery beast
indeed. Unlike many languages, English is almost completely uninflected. Where other languages change
the ending of a word to indicate its function in a sentence, English depends on the position of the word
to define its function.
There are remnants of an older, inflected language in modern English. Consider the sentence "He saw
him". You can't turn it round -- "Him saw he" is nonsense; "him" is not allowed in the position reserved
for the subject of the sentence and "he" is not allowed in the position reserved for the object. The
feminine form is even more startling -- "She saw her" and "Her saw she". Mostly it doesn't matter
though. "The sheep saw the sheep" can swap around quite happily.
In the first two examples the words are inflected in the sense that the spelling of the word defines what
job it does (subject or object). However nobody would ever inflect a sheep and staring at the spelling of
the word in isolation tells us nothing at all about its function in the sentence. The old joke that capitalism
is the exploitation of man by man and communism is the reverse doesn't work in an inflected language,
but English has no problems with it.
The structure of an English sentence is superficially much simpler than the structure of (say) a German
or Russian sentence since we don't have to bother with word endings. However this seeming simplicity
conceals a great subtlety and constructing a valid English sentence is not always easy without some preknowledge
of the rules since the words themselves give no hints.
Even assuming that all of this works properly, we are still left with the style of the writing, the rhetorical
tricks that dress up the prose in an attempt to get the message across. The way you say something can
profoundly affect the way the message is received. If I said "Hey! Titface! Pass the sodding salt!" You
would be less inclined to oblige than if I'd said "Could you pass the salt, please?". Such stylistic tricks are
called rhetoric and Aristotle wrote a whole book about it (called, not unnaturally, Rhetoric).
The tricks are common coin and most of us use them without thinking, and without knowing their
names. A metaphor allows us to draw a relationship between two things that are similar to a common
(unstated) third. To say that a robin is the herald of spring means that a robin is to spring as a herald is
to the message he brings his prince. No literal relationship is intended. A simile, on the other hand, would
imply a literal relationship and we could then say that a robin is like a herald of spring (which is nonsense,
since there is no such thing as a real herald of spring, but never mind). Almost invariably a simile reveals
itself by involving words such as "like" or "as if". Usually a metaphor is abstract and a simile is concrete
(which explains why the abstract simile I used above doesn't work properly). Aristotle remarked rather
drily that a simile is a metaphor with an explanation.
A synecdoche (lovely word -- I have no idea at all how to pronounce it) is a usage whereby a part stands
in for the whole. For example using the word sail to mean a ship or describing a computer system as a