… is an old com­put­er term for remov­ing all of the soft­ware from the hard­ware and start­ing over again. Back when we could rm -rf we would occa­sion­al­ly find that a sys­tem had got itself into a non‐recoverable state and need to be rebuilt from the ground up in order to func­tion again. Or on a hap­pi­er note when a project fin­ished we often wiped the soft­ware off of the hard­ware and repur­posed it for the next project.
While sys­tems have become much more resilient than they used to be, and rm -rf is rarely avail­able to the aver­age user, a com­pete wipe down of the bug­gy sys­tem using rm -rf’s new­er rel­a­tive, reset to fac­to­ry set­tings, is still the only solu­tion to cer­tain prob­lems. My iPhone got into one of those states recent­ly. Slow to load apps and data for sev­er­al weeks it final­ly reached the point of being unable to load the App Store for updates.
Google has as many solu­tions for these sorts of prob­lems as there are ways of cre­at­ing them. Every­thing from killing the run­ning apps to ful­ly eras­ing the phone’s mem­o­ry and rebuild­ing it from “like new.” It’s a fraught process. There is a fris­son of dread and hope. You will def­i­nite­ly start with the sim­plest least destruc­tive options but there’s always the ques­tion: What if you have to go all the way?
I found and tried a num­ber of folk reme­dies. Kill all the run­ning apps and then restart the phone. Tap any but­ton at the bot­tom of the App Store app 10 times to clear the cache — that worked for about 10 min­utes. Remove all of your net­work set­tings and reboot your WAP — okay so the WAP was lit­tle wedged, etc. In the end none of these worked. The last non destruc­tive option was a full back­up and restore. And easy but lengthy process that could  leave the phone in exact­ly the same bare­ly func­tion­ing state that I had start­ed in. An hour and half lat­er that’s exact­ly what hap­pened.
So there I was — faced with the option of last resort. The nuke and pave. Leav­ing me with a blank phone with­out a sin­gle bit of the per­son­al­i­ty that I’d giv­en it over the last two years. That at once won­der­ful and fright­en­ing prospect of a new start. There is dread. It’s a colos­sal has­sle. You lose every­thing. Every set­ting, every App, every bit of data. Your con­tacts, your text mes­sages, your fit­ness band data, your pho­tos of the dog act­ing idi­ot­ic. All of it. It’s like los­ing your phone only with­out the cost of new hard­ware. A total PITA.
And yet, and yet. It is also an excit­ing prospect. The new, vir­gin ter­rain. All of the mis­cel­la­neous cruft and crap and use­less apps and pass­words for wi‐fi points in air­ports you’ll nev­er vis­it again, and oop­sie pic­tures of your feet are gone. You get to start again with a sim­pler, clean­er, less over­whelm­ing device. You will also spend the next week adding back the apps, pass­words, and data that it turns out you were using but had for­got­ten about. You will lose all of your deeply ingrained kinet­ic mem­o­ry, the auto­mat­ic fin­ger press­es and unthink­ing scrolling though the pages to reach the thing that you need.
Still.. new ter­rain. As an adult how often do you get enter new ter­rain for such a small price? Sure you can change jobs, change hous­es, change spous­es, all of which take up a lot more than a lazy Sun­day after­noon babysit­ting a hard­ware reset and a cou­ple of hours of soft­ware updates and restor­ing data and pass­words. And so I did it. Set­tings -> Gen­er­al -> Reset -> Reset All Set­tings and pressed the many pop‐up but­tons that con­firmed that I did indeed intend to remake my phone into a pris­tine ver­sion of its now non‐functioning self.
We all love the oppor­tu­ni­ty to rein­vent our­selves. Even if it’s only in terms of lit­tle bit of pris­tine elec­tron­ic wilder­ness that we can remake to suit our now two years old­er and wis­er self. New phone wall­pa­per, a clean slate of wi‐fi set­tings, and some nifty new apps. — Even if you end up reim­port­ing all of the depress­ing fit­ness band data.

I’ve always had an unrea­son­ably inti­mate, if some­what stormy, rela­tion­ship with punc­tu­a­tion.

On one hand I want punc­tu­a­tion to make sense — to be use­ful, pre­dictable, and con­sis­tent­ly applic­a­ble. On the oth­er hand I want to be able to make use of it for my own ends — to fudge, push, pull, invert, and sub­vert its pre­scribed and pro­scribed uses. To make my par­tic­u­lar mean­ings just a lit­tle clear­er. I want to instruct my read­er in how to breathe my prose. In how to inhale its mean­ing and to exhale its sense.

I start mess­ing around with punc­tu­a­tion right from the begin­ning, my usu­al drafts are hash­es of frag­ments, rep­e­ti­tions, par­en­thet­i­cals, frag­ments, whizzes, bangs, splits, splotch­es, hen scratch­es and fly­specks. Type some words, throw down a com­ma to indi­cate a break in thought, add a dash — a minor detour if you will. Type some more words, drop in anoth­er com­ma for a slight turn to the left, use a peri­od to mark the end of the whole thought and it’s trail­ing lit­tle broth­ers.

Then a new para­graph, or maybe an extra blank line if I’m real­ly going to jump the hur­dle and land in some entire­ly oth­er field. I love ellipses, en dash­es, em dash­es, paren­the­ses; all of the brack­ets — angle, curly, and square. Each lit­tle glyph adding, to my eye, a slight­ly dif­fer fla­vor of pause or link­age. They cre­ate con­nec­tions or dis­con­nec­tions between the lit­tle thoughts that flow and stum­ble out of my fin­gers.

Even­tu­al­ly I make a prop­er first draft out of my mess. Using scis­sors, tape, and sev­er­al col­ors of high­lighter I take all of the frag­ments and push them to and fro and make them stand in, if not straight lines, at least con­vivial groups. Mar­shal them and march them out on to the field. Much of my crazy, lazy punc­tu­a­tion dis­ap­pears in this process. Not all of it. And some mis­takes are made.

A recent round of edit­ing led to ques­tions about how, exact­ly, to punc­tu­ate dia­log. Because I had writ­ten a whole sto­ry using my usu­al, utter­ly con­sis­tent form of punc­tu­a­tion. Which it turns out is wrong about half the time. Grade school failed me in so many ways.

Worse yet, my wrong­ness makes my favorite edi­tor twitchy because it involves com­mas.

Now I like com­mas as much as the next writer. In fact I like them a lit­tle too much. I’ve been known to sprin­kle them about in my writ­ing like jim­mies on an ice cream cone. With a free hand. But in dia­log? I have a prob­lem with them. I can nev­er get them in the right place when it comes to the dia­log tags. And now, after being asked specif­i­cal­ly to go look the damned things up, I know why. It’s because the rules make no sense.

To wit: this is the sim­plest, cor­rect punc­tu­a­tion of dia­log with attri­bu­tions.

“Go away,” said Tom.
“Go away!” said Tom.
“Go away?” said Tom.

That com­ma in the first exam­ple is the source of my anx­i­ety:

“Go away,” said Tom.

Why pray tell does the sim­ple declar­a­tive sen­tence lose it’s sim­ple declar­a­tive punc­tu­a­tion (the peri­od) and get sad­dled with the breathy lit­tle we’re-not-done-here-yet com­ma? That com­ma leads me to expect that Tom is going to have more to say once we get done iden­ti­fy­ing him. That what’s com­ing up is more like:

“Go away,” said Tom, “I’m not fin­ished wrap­ping your birth­day present.”

Mean­while, the excla­ma­tion and the ques­tion get the full dig­ni­ty of their true it’s-all-over punc­tu­a­tion marks. But there’s no com­ma to set off the clause. Why? If there needs to be some sort of com­ma to set off the speaker’s words as a clause in the first exam­ple there should be a com­ma in the sec­ond and third exam­ples. Why don’t we have:

“Go away!,” said Tom.

Or bet­ter yet…
“Go away!”, said Tom.

(Okay so we put the com­ma insides the quote because we always vio­late the order‐of‐operations and mis‐nest our punc­tu­a­tion. We’re Amer­i­cans. And we’re lousy pro­gram­mers. That part I can usu­al­ly remem­ber.)

But still, why?
“Go away,” said Tom.

It com­plete­ly baf­fles my sense of how punc­tu­a­tion should oper­ate. It’s tak­en me almost 50 years to final­ly get this ludi­crous­ly illog­i­cal rule straight in my head.

But now that it’s lodged up there, I promise that I will do my best when re‐working my dia­log to for­go the hum­ble peri­od and to get all the com­mas lined up on the right sides of the quotes. Because mis­placed com­mas make my favorite edi­tor twitch and he has enough twitch­es already.