what a great posting. i was just reading "The Mushri-English Pronouncing Dictionary", an obscure little book about another 19 century eccentric, Edmund Mooreshead, who taught classics at Winchester College from 1874 to 1903. The book was conceived as a joke, by a couple of his 6th form students, but it is actually a really interesting and serious attempt to record all the idiosyncratic speech, the ideolect I guess, of Mr. Mooreshead.

Yes, that is a great post. It called to mind Lewis Thomas's "Notes on Punctuation." Advance apologies for the longish taste:

There are no precise rules about punctuation (Fowler lays out some general advice (as best he can under the complex circumstances of English prose (he points out, for example, that we possess only four stops (the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the period (the question mark and the exclamation point are not, strictly speaking, stops; they are indicators of tone (oddly enough, the Greeks employed the semicolon for their question mark (it produces a strange sensation to read a Greek sentence which is a straightforward question: Why weepest thou; (instead of Why weepest thou? (and, of course, there are parentheses (which are surely a kind of punctuation making this whole matter much more complicated by having to count up the left-handed parentheses in order to be sure of closing with the right number (but if the parentheses were left out, with nothing to work with but the stops, we would have considerably more flexibility in the deploying of layers of meaning than if we tried to separate all the clauses by physical barriers (and in the latter case, while we might have more precision and exactitude for our meaning, we would lose the essential flavor of language, which is its wonderful ambiguity)))))))))))).

That last sentiment isn't too far from some that you have expressed here.

Thank you, Jason. My Inner Programmer is sobbing. ;-)