How we got from no spaces between words to the interrobang, with Florence Hazrat

The history of punctuation

0:00Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I am here with Florence Hazrat, author of this fabulous new book, On the Mark, all about punctuation. Her previous book was just about exclamation points. We had her on. That was fabulous. And now we're doing the whole world of punctuation. Florence, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Hello. Thanks for having me back. You bet. So what made you decide to go even more broad and cover all of punctuation this time?

0:32I think there were so many stories to tell. As I was working on the exclamation point and the other book, I just realized I had so much to say that stuff kept coming up. It's a gift that keeps on giving. And it was kind of sad just to let that drop by and like put into my drawers. And so I was very happy when I was able to figure out a way with my publisher to just dig in for another two or three years and now produce this kind of entire history of punctuation. It's obviously like a heavily researched book. It's so filled with just fascinating tidbits. I love the part about the Library of Alexandria and how things

1:08kind of got started there. Can you give us a little bit of that history?

Library of Alexandria and word spaces

1:11Yes, absolutely. So writing at the beginning in Greece and also in Italy, actually, ancient Rome didn't have spaces between words. And we're not entirely sure why that was the case. I know. Imagine how hard it would be to read. Yes, absolutely. So these spaces were invented in the early Middle Ages. But at the time in Greece and also Greek influenced Egypt, it didn't seem to make sense to somehow mark the beginnings and endings

1:42of words. Potentially, that is because they thought, okay, speech doesn't really have beginnings and endings. We don't really pause after every word. So perhaps they were figuring, okay, this text is just another manifestation of speech. But in all cases, whatever the reason is, there are no spaces. And that makes writing or reading, rather, of course, a little bit difficult. And so at this library in Alexandria, we have these 500,000 scrolls. It's a research library. And also the rulers of Alexandria

2:13were inviting people to come, people from different backgrounds, different linguistic capabilities. And most of these scrolls were in ancient Greek. But then these non-native readers struggled actually realizing where is the sentence? Where does it begin? Where does it end? And the same that we have in English as well, with A and N, and then a word with a vowel, like an adder, for example, right? These things that happen when we don't quite know where the word ends, starts and ends. That was also happening in Alexandria. And then the head librarian, the third head librarian, Estefanis of Byzantium,

2:47thought, okay, I want to help my readers. So he introduced dots at different levels of the line that gave very rudimentary information about the sentence. So there's a whole sentence at an end, and then the dot was at the top of the line. So not yet at the bottom, as we are used to that. That's kind of, they migrated over the course of a couple of centuries. And then there's a medial pause, and then a very short pause, or like a sentence that's grammatically not finished, something like

3:17that. And so readers had these crutches to be able to read faster and with more ability, like more grasp over the sense. As someone, you know, using language learning apps like, you know, Babel or Rosetta Stone, it's like, now imagine trying to learn that without spaces between the words. Like, thank you, Aristophanes, for giving us spaces. Or I guess he didn't do space, a bit like punctuation. And it was fascinating that they were just dots in different levels. And they sort of had a, am I understanding right, that they had sort of a different concept of a sentence and a comma

3:51wasn't exactly what a comma is now? Yes, exactly. So it's a little bit difficult for us to really understand how they perceived sentences, and how they speak, or like they, these ancient people speak about sentences. But actually, somebody like Thomas Jefferson, for example, who had this Latin education, still had a much better grasp over grammar than we have today, or over these concepts that the ancients were using in order to think of language. So for example, a period, one sentence

4:23would be a sentence that is grammatically complete, there's nothing missing, there's no verb missing, there's no subject missing, and also rhythmically complete. And now, of course, that that's something we don't really have access to anymore as such, especially people, very few people now know Latin and Greek. And then a colon would be a part of a sentence, like a clause that is grammatically complete, but the sense or the rhythm is not exactly right. And then a comma is missing both

4:53things, grammar and grammatical completion, and also rhythmical and sense completion. I mean, we take them as such specific meanings today, but they really have the meanings of these marks have evolved over time. You know, one thing you mentioned at the very beginning of your book that, you know, I never thought about before, but that you said all languages have punctuation, and we take that for granted, but it wouldn't have to be that way. Why do you think that every language has incorporated punctuation? You know, there could be different, there could be like

5:25wider spaces, or letters could go higher and lower, like punctuation is just, is it just the most efficient solution? Yes, I think so. Actually, also going back to the dots, these stuff in these dots from at the library, they were very easy to insert between letters or lines, or they could be inserted way, way, way after a manuscript has been copied, right? Hundreds of years even after, right? They don't really disturb the flow of the text at all. Whereas us with our spaces, of course, we wouldn't be

5:57able to do that anymore. You know, the way that we write, we write right away like that, right? We can't really change it afterwards. And so there's something about the effectiveness of just like a hook or a slash, a forward slash, or something like that, or a dot, that's definitely giving itself in terms of being very flexible and being able to be inserted afterwards. And also, you know, we need to reduce the potential of being mistaken for a letter as well. So Arabic and Persian, for example, with the

6:31different dots that these languages have, they actually had much different punctuation. So they would, for example, paint, draw a little flower or a heart or a teardrop at the end of a line or paragraph. And so in Arabic and Persian, the punctuation that they have now as well, which came from French and from English, is quite young, just maybe 150 years old. But I think the impulse to separate language, even on a page is universal somehow, because we want to have better access,

7:07faster access, and make sure that we understand and have a better grasp over our messages that we send because we're not in front of that person. And so we probably all, wherever we are, want to try and capture our voice, capture some tone, capture some grammatical markers to make sure that the potential for misreading is low. The eye-tracking studies you mentioned were so interesting in that the punctuation slows you down, but that's actually not a bad thing.

7:38Yes, exactly. So there are some eye-tracking studies with punctuation where readers' eyes were, or the people were able to capture where their eyes linger. And they do linger on a comma, but then the next parts of the sentence or the text can be processed faster and in more secure ways. So somehow our ancestors intuited that, I want to think. I want to think that over the course of 2,000 years, we as people have been able to come up with this really efficient system without actually

8:11kind of knowing about it. And now here we are with our cognitive science, and we can kind of prove it, right? But we have known this for thousands of years. I don't know if they're connected, but the idea that introducing some sort of break or pause helps you comprehend better reminded me of work on interjections or filler words like um and uh. And studies have shown that when people use uh or um, it actually increases comprehension of the part that follows. And it seemed very similar to what a comma does. So somehow that little hiccup

8:45in your brain makes it work differently so that you comprehend better. And it's just so fascinating that punctuation and, you know, the ums and the us, I mean, they serve different grammatical roles, obviously, but they might serve the same cognitive role. I'm just guessing here. It reminded me of each other. So let's jump ahead a little bit now to the Renaissance, because it seemed like there was

Renaissance innovations and emojis

9:06this explosion of punctuation, and then it kind of stopped. Like there was this period where there were lots of new punctuation marks, and then not so many. Like, why do you think that happened? That's a good question. I mean, we can speculate that during the Renaissance, there was this intense interest in language, intense interest in eloquence as well. And at the same time, we have the invention of the printing press and a slow movement from oral society towards a more textural eye-based society. And then these printers and writers in the Renaissance inventing the

9:42exclamation mark, the semicolon, the apostrophe, the dot, dot, dots, the dash. So there's just this explosion of more nuanced pausing, potentially with the parentheses, for example, as well. And that's, that probably comes from their love for language and also from their, them wanting to reproduce what they can do orally in a speech in text. So there's mastery over the text and how the text lends with the reader. And then afterwards, there's just nothing. We seem to be quite, you know, happy with

10:17what we have, the repertoire that we have, and that is being standardized and kind of spreads all across the world. And only maybe emojis, I think, would be able to perhaps join these ranks, but only one, one hub of a foot, maybe some, some, some emoji toes can kind of join the rank of punctuation because of what they do. There's kind of similar functions, but it seems that we are content with what we have. And on the one hand, language is so dynamic and changes so fast. And on the other hand,

10:49there's this lagging and there is this conservative, maybe pull or something that it takes some time until things spread and settle and people have understood what they can do with the new marks and new potential or something. And I suppose maybe the, if we say emojis have some function of punctuation, it doesn't really surprise because they come with new technology, the internet, the computer, the smartphone. So it seems that new technology and new ways of, you know, the surface of text, whether it's paper, papyrus, parchment on our screen that really also comes together when

11:26it comes to punctuation. What is it about emoji that makes it behave, that makes you think of it like punctuation? So emojis are not completely random. There are some linguistic studies that have shown that they come at the end of a clause, for example, or the end of a sentence, even if we just say, or just say yes with a thumbs up or something. So they're not completely random. We don't sprinkle them in just anywhere, which maybe matches a little bit that our punctuation also comes at

11:57these grammatical places to mark the shape of a sentence. And we also use them in order to express emotion. So that could be the function of an exclamation mark, for example, a heart emoji or a fire emoji. These are more decoded emotions potentially, whereas the exclamation mark, with exclamation mark, we have to do a bit of interpretation. Okay, what does that mean? Does it mean anger? Does it mean enthusiasm? So emojis are on the one hand a little bit more explicit, but I think every one of us also

12:28has had the experience where emojis were actually difficult to understand in terms of what does this person actually want to say? How does the emoji, what is my association with an emoji and their association? How does that come together with the sentence? And emojis, I think, bring in tone, which some of punctuation also does, like the question mark, the exclamation mark, or a dot, dot, dot, dot, that's hesitating, for example, or a dash. And these are also tonal functions. But overall, I think emojis are part of punctuation. They have some functions, but they're also doing their

13:02own thing. I'm not sure yet how we can categorize them because they tell little stories. You know, we tell little stories with the emojis sometimes. We pick one word and we illustrate the sentence that, let's say, I asked you, do you want to come to the cinema? And then I put like a film scroll, which is a little illustration of my sentence, right? And the philosopher Lisa Gittelmann said that they probably mostly have social relationship management functions. So she calls that fatigue, just like, hi, how are you? You know, we don't really mean to ask, but it's just like,

13:37I see you, I recognize you. I want to soften my message by sending this little cute picture.

13:52It is so interesting, and you choose the cinema and maybe not necessarily a car or a bus, which might be how you'd get to the cinema. It is fascinating the way people use emoji. And you might think, talking about new technology, we talked about this last time you were on, but it was so revelatory for me. And maybe other people might not have heard that show. Can you explain why people don't put periods at the end of their text messages? Yes. So there's lots of studies that have found that people found periods at the end of very short text messages, aggressive, passive aggressive. They thought they were in trouble. Let's say,

14:26I invite you to, you know, would you like to go get pizza today? And then you write, yes, period. You know, it kind of breaks with the implicit parameters of texting, which is that it's fast, it's just shot off. It doesn't necessarily behave according to rules. Nobody minds if you don't capitalize the I in a text message. It's very informal writing. So why would you go to the trouble of actually putting a period? That must mean something. And then the period is such a punch

14:57somehow if there's nothing after it. And also for some of the keyboards, depending, we really need to like go to shift and like find the mark that we want to make. So it's a bit more trouble actually. And if somebody goes to these lengths, they must mean something. There must be some implication. And we are doing all of this within a split second, all of this thinking, all of this feeling, which I find so fascinating that these nuances are still so much present, even though we could

15:27think that, oh, you know, this texting is behaving according to different rules. We're a bit sloppy. We don't really mind, you know, something that isn't written properly or something. Actually, we do mind very much so. And other linguists, though, have found that the period still maintains its kind of normal way of functioning when the sentence is a bit longer. So if we have like longer text messages, just like maybe 20 words or something, and we have verbs like I think, I feel, I believe,

15:59or, you know, something more cognitive, then punctuation still kind of works in the normal way. We don't really attach value to it as such. But in the one text message in a situation like that, we become

Failed punctuation marks

16:13worried with a period. You know, we talked about, you know, maybe there weren't a lot of new punctuation marks since the Renaissance, but people have tried, you know, people have proposed all sorts of new punctuation marks. So what are some of your favorites of those? And why do you think they seem to always fail now? Yes. So over the course of hundreds of years, actually, people have proposed new marks, most of the time it was to decode irony. And of course, it's so hard. It's hard face to face, right? We have our facial expressions, our gestures, our position, our tone, posture, tone of voice. So it becomes even

16:48harder when we just have a text. So Rousseau, for example, wanted to, you know, suggest that we need a mark to attach to irony, ironic sentences, so that we can be sure that we shouldn't take that at face value. But nothing of this ever stuck, which is maybe because we kind of like to be teased a little bit. So I really honor these attempts. But I also, you know, see that language is bigger than that. And

17:18and it's always going to be slippery. And we sort of like this ambiguity. There was, for example, the Interrobang in 1962, advertisement agent Martin Spector introduced that or suggested that it's just a superimposition of exclamation mark and a question mark, kind of like something, something like a rhetorical question. You know, we also attach these to when we have a rhetorical question. And he said that these 1960s, this time is so full of chaos and crises and calamity,

17:49and we need a mark that's just so punchy and that we can that represents our time. And it didn't really catch on, although it still lurks in some fonts on on the computer. And also in some 1970s typewriters, they have this Interrobang that you can attach to it. But it didn't catch on perhaps because again, we were fine with what we had. So it was it wasn't really something new. It was a recombination of what there was. And then there's, for example, the Sark mark. I think that's from 2011 or 12.

18:21A father son duo in the US wanted to kind of suggest a mark that looks a little bit like a snail for sarcasm, again, to mark tone, but you were supposed to pay $2. So I think it's a combination of we have enough, we don't actually want that much more because it can also become confusing. And with the things that we have, we can actually combine them in a way that they cover our needs. And maybe again, the human mind likes a little bit of ambiguity, perhaps,

18:53and doesn't doesn't like everything, you know, to be dished out so clearly. I really thought the Interrobang might like have a second wind when social media first launched and and character limits were so short when when Twitter first launched. I really thought the Interrobang might make it because it saved a character. But but then the limits got longer and it just sort of

Shakespeare and editorial changes

19:14faded away again. I want to go back to the history a little bit because you've talked about how editors can make punctuation choices that frustrate authors or change the meaning of works. And there were lots and lots of great examples of this in the book. One that stuck out to me was about the difference between Cleopatra and Mark Antony in Shakespeare's play, and how that changed over time. Yeah, so Shakespeare didn't actually give us any manuscripts. So we have three pages that survived that

19:48we think are Shakespeare's. And in those pages, there's just a little scattering of periods and commas. There's not actually any question marks, any dashes. And now we can speculate was that because Shakespeare didn't know punctuation very well, but he was so educated, right? That's, that's quite unlikely. But maybe it was because he wanted to give it up to the actors to interpret the text in a way that makes sense to them, that works for them without imposing his own interpretations. Or maybe

20:20he just didn't care. And, you know, he was writing it very quickly and stuff. But the long and short of it is Shakespeare didn't actually potentially choose the punctuation that we have in the texts of his plays. Neither in the quarters, nor in the big folio collection of 1623, of which we also, the Antony and Cleopatra is also from the folio. So we have this one text. And there are 16 exclamation marks in the folio in the 1623 one. Whether Shakespeare put them in or some other typesetter or

20:53some proofreader, in the end, that doesn't matter so much because these people were much closer to Shakespeare's educational level and also mindset at the Renaissance. There were book people, you know, it wasn't just anybody who was able to do that. So we can kind of accept that these marks that are there might represent authorial intent to a certain degree. But then over the course of history now, editors started to massage the text and introduce their own interpretations of words or letters or

21:25also characters. So we have this Folger edition of Antony and Cleopatra, where there are 200 exclamation marks. This is, of course, mind blowing. This is like a level that is maybe not warranted by the play and definitely not by the original number. And not only that, it's mostly that Cleopatra speeches have an exclamation mark. And of course, that makes her shouty on the page. And while I love the exclamation mark and I wrote my first book on it, I do have to say that that can be quite disruptive

21:57to have three, four exclamation marks on every page when you read. And maybe also then when you stage the play, the actor who plays the character might think that they have to shout or they have to be particularly expressive or enthusiastic. And in a play that is very much about the feminine and the masculine, the Orient and Rome, representative perhaps of England, that actually does become an issue. And especially when the added exclamation marks that are added to Antony's speeches cluster

22:32around a battle scene or his death rather than any speech, you know, then we see that editing punctuation is actually political and actually does matter very much. Yeah, no, it's fascinating. There's so many examples in the book. Jack Kerouac also was very unhappy with the punctuation or he didn't even get to proof the final. Like it seemed like they hid the punctuation from him. Am I understanding that right? Yes. So he typed out the first version so quickly in just a couple of weeks and that punctuation then

23:06got edited and changed and got standardized. And then it doesn't represent quite the same breath worthless, spontaneous writing with which this book came into being and with which maybe we also want to read it. Yeah. And so reading all these stories, it made me wonder if you had any punctuation disputes in the editing of your book. So is all of that punctuation and on the mark like what you wanted or did you have to fight for any particular? I imagine it'd be an especially important editing process. You know,

23:40just like books about mine, like the grammar is important for yours. The punctuation is going to be really important. Are there any stories there? Yes, that was very important to me. And I made sure from the very beginning that the editors would accept and respect my punctuation as well. And of course, there's house styles. So, you know, I'm open to discussing the Oxford comma, let's say. But my punctuation is mostly according to breath rather than necessarily very bare. For example, some authors just like it very bare. I like a bit

24:11more punctuation because I like to kind of guide the reader along and as if we were talking like us now having a conversation. So it's quite conversational. And it was very clear that this would be a condition maybe that I would insist on my punctuation. So I was very lucky that that was completely respected. We did fight over a couple of items, for example, some parts in the digital punctuation chapter. I think that the loss of the paragraph is quite significant that we experience

24:43nowadays, because the paragraph, not only like one sentence, but a chunk of sense, a unit of sense is one of the earliest ways that humanity has separated our text and try to make sense of a longer text. And now because we read on the phone, which is very slim, a slim screen, the paragraph is disappearing. We only have one sentence that becomes big on the small screen, but it's actually just one sentence when we read it on a desktop. For example, the BBC has, I think maybe they even have

25:16a policy at this point that the paragraphs need to be super short, if not just one sentence. And that's something I really wanted to be in the book. And my publisher wasn't entirely sure whether that was relevant, because it's maybe not super interesting or catchy, but it is kind of the staple of punctuation, which is units of sense, to help the eye and help the mind read. And so I really wanted that to be in there, just to maybe also make people, give people a little bit to think about in terms of the changes

25:49that we're witnessing through the digital medium. That's a great point. I wouldn't have thought of that. It actually immediately makes me think of newsprint, how, you know, journalistic style is also shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs going back to, you know, newspaper being printed in columns. But now phones are kind of more like newspaper columns. Yeah, exactly. And I think the British government has a policy that their sentences on official websites can't be longer than 25 words, which is not very long. And I feel like they should maybe give us

26:23more credit to be able to read and either have this attention span. So yeah, I think there's a universal kind of direction towards the shorter and the bite size.

Digital reading habits

26:34Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being here, Florence. This is a fabulous book on the mark. If you're listening, you're going to love it. It is just, as I said, filled with fascinating tidbits, all sorts of research about punctuation and great stories. So Florence, thank you so much. Where can people find you online? Yes, I'm on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube as well. I post stuff about punctuation, but also just whimsical things about language and also the writing process, what it's like to be a writer.

27:05Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for being here. For the Grammar Pelusians, the people who wonderfully support our show, we have a bonus segment. We're going to talk about all sorts of interesting things. I want to go back and talk about where spaces in writing actually came from. The story about how Arabic got its modern punctuation is really interesting, and we're going to get Florence's book recommendations as well, and maybe some other things too. So join us. We appreciate your support. And for the rest of you, that's all. Thanks for listening.