Verbal Punctuation
From Tractatus
Iain has a great habit of inserting quaint little phrases into his speech, in order to (verbally) explicate where the humor and/or sarcasm exists. Even on this wiki (on my talk page), he injects (unnaturally?) "pause", to indicate where in the midst of his story you are supposed to think he is interesting.
Pause.
Note that this page exists only to rag on Iain. I think this quality is endearing, though I've patently tried to avoid using it (I have this habit of emulating the way other people speak... it's dangerous for me to be around brits for too long). In case you haven't noticed, I also have a habit of using parentheses to contain entire sentences as sub-thoughts -- I'm very heirarchal like that.
Anyway, the canonical example of Iain's "Verbal Punction" is when he provides a counter-example for something and uses the phrase "comma-space-but". Yes! In spoken word he says these things! It really is a marvelous Iainism.
--Hytmal 01:14, 16 Nov 2005 (EST)
[shrug]
For a related Iain-Punctuation reference, see Quote 275. She knows of what she speaks.
--Iain 03:17, 16 Nov 2005 (EST)