(Actually, it's a made-up word, from "grammar" and "panopticon." So don't try to use it in Scrabble. Which you probably couldn't anyway, unless there was a particularly serendipitous collection of letters already on the board.)
Why should you care about this stuff? People understand what you mean, right?
Written language is a set of tools that give us the ability to communicate efficiently and with precision. When used well, punctuation conveys additional meaning (which saves you words--and explanations when you're misunderstood). When used not so well, punctuation can keep the Supreme Court busy for a couple hundred years. Let's take a look at the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.Okay, what exactly does that say? No one is really quite certain (though various judges and others have claimed to be at various times) whether this is about state militias or individually-owned weapons. The founders could have used a good editor.
Let's take the amendment apart:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,That part seems to make sense. The founders were in favor of having a militia, as long as it's well regulated. Fair enough. As a reader, I expect "a well regulated Militia" to be the subject of the sentence, because it has that nice modifying clause. Now let's look at the other half:
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.That last comma is unnecessary (maybe it's just an ink splotch on the original document), but remove that and you have a perfectly clear statement saying that people have the right to bear arms. Subject ("the right of the people to keep and bear Arms"), predicate ("shall not be infringed").
The problem comes when the two parts are stuck together. The sentence appears to have two different subjects. It feels like something is missing. And as a result, the meaning--the authors' intent--is not clear.
You'd probably like to convey your meaning more clearly than the founders did theirs in the Second Amendment. The Grammopticon is here to help.
