Yes, particularly in working with papyrus - which wood tics and other can
make look a variation on swiss cheeze or vurst - the [ ] does indicate
something is "missing". The width between the sides of the bracket, or just
an open ended ] can indicate the amount of what is missing (from a word to
a whole phrase.
Yes, I play with [
]
[ ]
your're fired [ ]
For both imaginative (what's missing) as well as spatial, musical effects.
Tho maybe not a poem, I suspect any of us - at one point in our lives -
could fill the blanks above.
[ ]
> Mark:
>
>
>> Stephen: [ ] is a standard schoarly tool. with nothing in between it means
>> missing, with something in between it means supplied by the editor, with
>> sic in between it means it's the author's mistake not mine.
>
> Also, by extension, square brackets can be used as a verbal stage direction,
> for an {unspoken} aside, as in, ' "That's right [you stupid idiot!]," he
> said.'
>
> A spoken silence?
>
> But punctuation is notoriously fraught, both between different registers (as
> Mark's pointing to scholarly usage shows) and between USA/UK usage, as well
> as being even less stable and rule-controlled than orthography in general.
>
> Also, when (and why) did it come into being? A right mare's nest. {My
> feeling is mostly with printing, post-MS, which in turn reflects the spoken
> form of the language. An interesting shift, at the cusp of the shift from
> MS to print, is between Wyatt's poems in his own MS/hand [Egerton],
> basically unpunctuated, and the first printings in Tottel's Miscellany in
> 1558 (?), which we'd now see as "heavily overpunctuated".}
>
> I'd point to inter alia Rosemary Huismans, +The written poem+, which in turn
> draws on the later work of M.A.K.Halliday, as exploring the problematics of
> the interface between spoken and written language(s).
>
> Quote (roughly) Halliday somewhere in +The Spoken and the Written
> Language+ -- "Punctuation disambiguates in writing that which is unambiguous
> in speech (where there is tone and context absent in writing)."
>
> {NOTE: Also, as follows, parentheses, like inverted commas, are
> recursive -- (one [followed by two (within which is three) ] ).
>
> 'Nuff!!!
>
> Random Rodent
