John McWhorter at the New York Times:
If you are of a certain age, notice how you are likely using exclamation points more lately. It has become a mark of agreeability in a way that would mystify a time traveler from as recently as a couple decades ago. “See you in a bit!” “I looked for you yesterday but you weren’t there!” I now email like that.
This is part of a long story Florence Hazrat tells in “On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World,” due out in August. Hazrat takes us from when writing had no punctuation at all, through when it was invented largely as a guide to reading out loud, to today’s proliferation of marks like hashtags and emojis.
It’s a roller coaster of a story. Ancient Greek had no spaces between words, Hazrat writes, and Aristophanes of Byzantium, a librarian in Alexandria, found it cumbersome. He came up with a three-dot system to indicate how long one was to pause in reciting the text: a dot at bottom, middle and top. Top was a full stop, what we know as a period. Bottom was a brief pause, as in “comma.” Middle was if you wanted something in between, a kind of “I’m OK but just wait a sec” — kind of a semicolon. I’d like it if we could go back to that.
More here.
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