We usually don’t pay much attention to pauses in language – it’s easy to assume they’re just meaningless gaps between the meaningful words. But pauses are everywhere in spoken language – and, as Andrew Leong has been studying, in written language too. Pauses are not just an absence of meaning, but can drastically shift the meaning of the words around them. From an American short story, to a Japanese coming-of-age novel to a Japanese-American play, Andrew argues that pauses are a device for hinting at things left unsaid.
Bonus clip
Andrew discusses a Japanese novel where the pauses don’t slow down, but actually speed up, the action.
Works mentioned
– Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
– Nobuko Yoshiya, Kibara (Yellow Rose)
– Schweddy Balls (Saturday Night Live sketch)
Further reading
Kathryn Schulz at Vulture – The 5 Best Punctuation Marks in Literature
Keith Houston at BBC – The mysterious origins of punctuation
Noreen Malone at Slate – The Case—Please Hear Me Out—Against the Em Dash
Pico Iyer at Literary Hub – The Infinite Silences of Japan
Jeff Janisheski at The Conversation – Empire of stillness: the six essential aspects of Japanese Noh
The New Yorker – Terry Gross on finding her voice (video)