Forward!

Amidst all the commentary following the Obama re-election, there has been little attention paid to the importance of punctuation in securing the president’s victory.  The initial reception of Obama’s campaign slogan ‘Forward.’ was decidedly lukewarm, with criticism directed at its inclusion of the full stop, which one of his advisers argued could be taken to mean ‘forward, now stop’.  Although objecting to the use of the period here, Austin Goolsbee did note that it could be worse, ‘It could be “Forward” comma, which would make it raise the question “and now what?”’  Carol Lee of The Wall Street Journal consulted grammatical experts over this use of the full stop, with some objecting to it on the grounds that ‘Forward’ is not a sentence.  George Lakoff, a professor of Linguistics, argued that the full stop, termed the ‘period’ in America, is appropriate because ‘Forward’ is an imperative sentence: ‘You can look at the period as adding a sense of finality, making a strong statement: Forward. Period. And no more’.   

Despite Lakoff’s defence, there followed a tendency for the full stop to be dropped in campaign ads.  One of Obama’s spokespeople claimed that there was no particular reason for this, suggesting that further punctuation excitement could be around the corner: ‘Stay on your toes—anything could happen. Do not be surprised if we introduce a semicolon.’  More excitement was to come, but in the form of the exclamation mark rather than the semicolon, added in October.  Rather than endorsing Lakoff’s interpretation of the slogan as an imperative, the Obama camp explained the addition of the exclamation mark as a way of ‘pumping up’ the slogan to reflect the team’s continued energy for the campaign.  The rest is, of course, history.  Not strictly about spelling, I know, but surely a better indication that punctuation matters than that old joke about a panda.