Brackets.
Parentheses.
Call them what you will, those two little curved lines that quietly usher themselves into our sentences, pulling along an afterthought, an explanation, or sometimes just a muttered aside we weren’t brave enough to put in the main text.
They’ve been hanging around since at least the fifteenth century, when early printers borrowed the idea from scribes who used them to mark out murmured words or notes. The name ‘parenthesis’ itself comes from Greek (doesn’t everything-henceforth the accuracy of the saying ‘it’s all Greek to me’-because nearly everything is) meaning ‘a putting in beside’-which is about as accurate a job description as you could hope for.
Now, depending on which side of the Atlantic you find yourself, these marks take on a slightly different identity crisis. In British English, the term ‘brackets’ covers the whole family-curves, squares and the arty { } curly ones.
In American English, they’ve decided that the curved ones ( ) are ‘parentheses’ and the square ones [ ] are ‘brackets’.
This explains why writers sometimes think they’re following the rules only to be told, baffled, that they’re wrong. It isn’t that they’re wrong.
It’s just that English is once again being its usual, unhelpful self.
The curved pair are the ones most of us know and perhaps over liberally use. They allow us to tuck in asides, clarifications, or thoughts that don’t quite deserve full billing.
So they’re the literary equivalent of whispering something behind your hand.
Square brackets, on the other hand, are the tools of editors and academics.
Serious looking people who wear ancient jackets with leather patches on the elbows.
They (the square brackets, not the serious looking people) allow intrusions into someone else’s writing-little nudges of clarification, or corrections.
Think of them as a polite cough during a speech. ‘He [the King] arrived late’.
Then there are the curly brackets; { and } beloved of mathematicians and computer programmers but seldom seen in everyday prose.
To most writers, they look like they’ve wandered in from the wrong room and are best ignored.
They can join the exclamation marks (see last weeks blog) outside the room and missing the grammar party.
Of course, literature has always had a soft spot for the bracket.
Austen used them to wink at the reader.
Mr. John Dashwood was a steady respectable young man, who inherited all the honour and fortune of his family; and she had the advantage of being able to treat him (though he never deserved the smallest portion of either) with respect.”
Dickens to digress.
Mr. Slumkey (for that was the Honourable gentleman’s name) was a very popular candidate…
Or Joyce to go wandering off into the undergrowth.
He thought of his father (the faint odour of wetted ashes hung in the room air)…
A page sprinkled with them can feel conspiratorial, as though the author is pulling you aside for a chat, while everyone else in the novel politely gets on with the plot.
Overdo it, though, and the effect is less charming and more like sitting next to someone who insists on muttering commentary throughout a film.
They’ve even had pet names along the way. At one time, they were known as ‘lunulae’, meaning ‘little moons’.
It’s an endearing thought, but alas, that particular name never caught on. Brackets (or parentheses) they remained-that is, except in the world of screenwriting, where they’re reborn as ‘wrylies’, those little instructions under a line of dialogue telling the actor how to deliver it.
‘So that’s it. You’re really going to leave me tomorrow?’ (say with real emotion)
To summarise? Perhaps it’s best to regard brackets and parentheses in the same way you might your favourite seasoning.
Used sparingly, they add a dash of flavour, a hint of personality, even a touch of intimacy between the writer and reader.
Used too liberally, they drown out the dish entirely. So go ahead, feel free to sprinkle a few in. Just don’t let them take over.
After all, nobody likes a sentence that never quite manages to find its way out of a pair of brackets.
