Wordwatch: questions and question marks

I’m fascinated by a development that has occurred in the last couple of decades: the replacement in numerous contexts, but mostly in journalism, of the simple noun “question” with the noun-phrase “question mark”.

The Spectator supplied a good example when they used the new form in an article on Thursday: “Cain’s departure put a question mark over the future of the others.” What the writer could equally well said was “raises questions over the future of others.” The “question marks” are actually the punctuation we use in print to denote the interrogative. It’s an odd transference from the fact to what might be called the meta-fact.

Here are some more specimens: “At a time when companies are making people redundant, there is a major question mark over the morality of increasing the pressure on businesses and families…” letter, D. Telegraph, 28 July 2009. And: “Detective stories contain a far greater number of question marks than most other novels”– Ian Patterson in London Review of Books, November 2020. In both these cases, the ‘question mark’ is used as a substitute for the more abstract – but more accurate – word ‘question’. (And of course, Patterson is not referring to the typography of the detective stories.)

What has prompted this idiomatic shift? I think the new phraseology owes quite a lot to a wish on the part of writers to spruce up their sentences with a spot of circumstantial sparkle:  a “question mark” is somehow more evocative, more concrete, than a mere “question”. There’s no harm in it, but it makes me think irresistibly of characters in strip cartoons who go around with exclamation marks and other punctuation points in little exploding bubbles over their heads.

And now, it’s threatening to become, not a literary device to liven up a plain prose sentence, but a cliché, deployed without thought and without even an awareness that in fact a question mark is a rather different thing from a question. In my last example, clearly the “question mark” can’t be “major”. All question marks are equal, I think we can agree. That adjective must apply to the question itself, for which the “question mark” is doing metaphorical duty.

These tricks generally enjoy a brief shelf-life and are then forgotten, as new ways to improve one’s sentences become available. I trust that these writers won’t think I’m criticising their prose: just doing my job and analysing what strikes me as an interesting, and definitely an amusing new verbal phenomenon.