I’m a parentheses addict. I know that dashes are supposed to be saved for emphasis, but I forget this when it comes to parentheses.

The problem is that my brain works in parenthetical mode (I call this associative thinking) to the point where everything I think or say reminds me of something else which reminds me of something else, so that almost all of my thoughts are parenthetical notes tacked on to the thoughts that came before them.

Did you see how I just did that? I already used parentheses once without thinking about it. And now I’m making a parenthetical statement without using parentheses. What’s wrong with me? Oh no, now I’ve got rhetorical questions too. And if I could remember the term for it, I’d include directly addressing the reader in a pointed way as well.

Anyway, moving on to my real point, I was just realizing a funny thing about parentheses. At first I said “the” funny thing but I’m sure that there’s more than one funny thing about parentheses.

So, the last time you took English (I’m assuming it was freshman year for most of you) your professor probably told you that you offset side notes with commas if you want them to be emphasized in the same way as the rest of your text, dashes if you want to add emphasis, and parentheses if you want to lessen the emphasis.

The odd (and by odd I mean funny) thing about this is that any sane reader notices parentheses to an exponentially greater extent than he or she notices commas.

Now, you might argue that since we’ve been taught to understand parentheses as a denotation that the text contained within them is not as important as the text surrounding them, we doubtless end up noticing the text within parentheses at least as much as, if not more than, the surrounding text.

Of course, the very fact that I’m writing this treatise on parentheses goes to show that they are not serving their purpose. They’re supposed to go unnoticed, to be subliminal messages, etc.

Instead, I’ve spent the last fifteen minutes of my life pondering them. And, if you internalize what you read at all, you’re going to start paying even greater attention to parentheses than you have in the past.

So I guess I’m a terrible English major (more precisely, humanities major with a literature concentration) for contributing to this dilemma where people know parentheses are supposed to mean one thing but think of them as meaning something else.

Nevertheless, parentheses are really cool even if we don’t always know how to take them. Another cool thing about parentheses that I’ve noticed is that they’re a great way for computer nerds to express themselves.

I’ve tried countless times to come up with a typed example of what I mean here, but I’m not a computer nerd and I’m not going to end a sentence of mine with a smiley face. Besides, we all know that guy who didn’t realize that girls like real flowers but kind of got the idea right by sending her an e-mail with color-coded parentheses and similar symbols readily available on the QWERTY board perfectly placed in such a way as to create an image that would look somewhat like a bouquet of flowers if flowers ever looked like this )()(.

Just imagine: Without parentheses, that guy would have had to go out and spend 50 bucks on overpriced flowers at a florist.

Matt Brumit is a junior humanities major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].