“Punctuation was, it is sad to say, invented a very long time ago. Even more frustrating, it has remained with us ever since.” — Anne Elizabeth Moore
Back about 2,500 years ago, Greek playwright Aristophanes had a problem. It seems that none of the actors reading the lines over which he had labored so hard knew when it was time to stop speaking for a moment or even when they should just slow down a bit.
The solution that the shrewd scribe came up with was to place one of three dots at the spots wherever he wanted the thespians to take a breath. A low dot signified that the speaker should pause briefly, while a middle or upper dot signified a medium or long pause respectively.
Legend has it that the three dots eventually became the comma, colon and period that we have today, and the beginning of punctuation marks as we know them was off and running.
But not all attempts at creating these glyphs would turn out to be successful, which is what we’ll delve into this time: failed punctuation marks, as well as some symbols that might actually see the light of day.
Some of the more “recent” failed attempts at developing new punctuation marks began around the late 1500s. An English printer named Henry Denham came up with something called the percontation point (also called the irony mark), which was a backward-facing question mark whose job was to alert the reader to the fact that the preceding question was rhetorical. One writer called it “sarcasm in one character.”
Nearly a century later, British philosopher John Wilkens unveiled his own version of the irony mark, which took the form of an inverted exclamation point. Neither one of them caught on.
Following the successful creation of quotation marks during the early 18th century, the pursuit of new punctuation marks seemed to largely pause until the early 1940s, when British science fiction fans came up with the quasi quote. The purpose of this new glyph, which was made by typing a hyphen over a quotation mark, was to indicate “words to that effect” when the writer was paraphrasing.
The following decade finally yielded something we could actually use when Cambridge philosophy professor Elizabeth Anscombe gave the world scare quotes, which her husband, Peter Geach, called “a writer’s assault on his or her own words.”
Kind of a written version of air quotes, scare quotes are basically meant to do the opposite of what regular quotes do, by making it clear that something is “so-called.” For example, in the math test, Clint’s “superior intellect” failed him.
The 1960s started off with an interrobang, a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point, which was the brainchild of advertising executive Martin K. Speckter. Somewhat surprisingly, his creation actually gained some traction in the literary world, with him doing several high-profile interviews about his new mark. The Remington-Rand typewriter company even made a replacement key that featured the interrobang.
A combination of the Latin word “interrogatio” (questioning) and “bang” (printer jargon for an exclamation point), Speckter’s new mark was meant to apply solely to a rhetorical statement, as in “What the heck were you thinking (interrobang)”
Right now I’m thinking that I’m out of space and will conclude our look at weird punctuation marks — some of which might actually catch on — next time.
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.”
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