THE FREE SPEECH MANIFESTO


Our muse is a free-spirited broad. She doesn't take kindly to being pollarded, pruned or stretched out on an espalier of commas, semicolons and apostrophes. Instead, she prefers to howl her own tune. After all, this is a question of principle - the principle of autonomy. Accordingly, you don't allow yourself to be pushed around by some pedant. Or by a system or idol.

The iconoclasts disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be obtained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing punctuation. Let academia tremble at a revolution in the way we write. The rebels have nothing to lose but their commas. They have an uninterrupted flow to win. Members of Stop the Full Stop Society, unite!

This adds a new angle to free speech - a discourse unfettered by the jungle of coercive commas and stops. And it's not just peasants like us who are crowding the barricades: George Bernard Shaw before us had a phobia for apostrophes in contractions; e.e.cummings notoriously had no shift key on his typewriter and has been emulated ever since by film credits designers with artistic pretensions.

The market place also is radical. John Lewis Partnerships now sell us MENS WEAR, showing us they're in on it too. We hope this trend will go to the limit - a reversion to ancient Roman inscriptions where the very spaces between words were suppressed. But it needs constant vigilance and a permanent struggle against the forces of repression.

Yet what are the dwindling reactionary forces telling us? First (if we are not to be struck dead for listening to such seditious talk), they tell us that punctuation is a conventional system of signs in the service of thought; it exists, they allege, to make our meaning clear. The boys books, for example, could mean 'the books of the boy' or 'the books of the boys'. Bullshit! Who needs to know such nice distinctions of number? Creative writing (there must be such a thing: it's on every university syllabus) need not be trammelled by petty considerations of meaning - which we rightly ridicule as semantics. We must rebel, always rebel - and there is an end to it.

And if you say - no, you wouldn't, but someone might - that we should revolt against something more significant than the addition or suppression of a comma, you'd be wrong. Let's trash the whole middle class system of punctuation, which was only invented to make us feel inadequate in the first place. What we write cannot be as important as how we set it down: every rule we adhere to diminishes us as human beings by detracting from our freedom. What the hell does it matter in the end what we mean (as if we knew)? What does matter is the unpunctuated shriek.