Austen’s Ampersands.

Louis Menand’s NYkr review essay “The Curious Power of Punctuation” (archived) deals with what sound like stupid books and has some stupid things to say about them and the subject of language in general (compare Menand on the Dictionary), and I don’t feel like dealing with all the stupidity, so I’ll let you read it for yourselves if you so desire and simply reproduce the opening passage, which I found eye-opening: Do you know the first sentence of “Pride and Prejudice”? You probably think you do, but I bet you don’t. The answer is “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” Did you remember to put in the commas? What are those commas doing there, anyway? By modern usage, they should mark off a non-restrictive clause, but they don’t. Nor are they marking items in a series or natural pauses in speech. Did Jane Austen even write them? Probably not. Judging by her few surviving manuscripts, Austen didn’t much use…