13. The Punctuation Marks That Disappeared

Star-Spangled Stories. Article 13.

The Punctuation Marks That Disappeared

Lost marks, an exclamation mark inside a question mark and the big history of little dots

What if there were a special mark for irony? Or for a question that is also a cry of surprise? Some people invented exactly such marks – and even had them printed. Yet today we mostly write ordinary question marks, exclamation marks and full stops. The history of punctuation is a story of the human effort to put the tone of a voice on paper.

When readers had to find the end of a sentence themselves

Written text once looked very different. In some ancient manuscripts, words were written without spaces, and a uniform modern punctuation did not exist yet. Readers found their way through their knowledge of the language, the division of lines and, gradually, scribes' marks for pauses.

Ancient grammarians tried using dots at different heights or other marks to distinguish shorter and longer pauses. Medieval scribes then developed new marks connected with reading aloud. Our present system is the result of centuries of experiments, not of one big reform.

Printing taught punctuation to be regular

A scribe writing by hand could allow himself some freedom: the form of a mark varied from place to place and from person to person. Printing, however, preferred repeatable, recognizable shapes. Around 1500, the Venetian printer Aldus Manutius played an important role in fixing some punctuation habits; he is especially connected with introducing the semicolon into printed texts.

Punctuation gradually began to serve not only reading aloud but also showing the grammatical structure of a sentence clearly. That does not mean everyone agreed quickly: even in Shakespeare's time, different printers could mark pauses slightly differently.

Marks we use without remembering where they came from

Elegant but poorly documented legends circulate about the origin of some familiar marks. For example, the claim that the question mark was made by combining the letters q and o from Latin quaestio is often repeated as a certainty. In reality its development is much more complicated, and such a simple explanation has not been reliably proved.

¶ Pilcrow: the paragraph mark we hardly see

Old manuscripts used various marks for the start of a new section of text. One tradition developed into the pilcrow (¶), the paragraph symbol. Today it is not part of an ordinary printed novel, but you can see it, for example, in a word processor when you turn on the display of non-printing characters.

It is a remarkable survivor: a medieval relative of the modern paragraph still lives right inside our computers. And the same is true of other small marks that have survived in typesetting and proofreading rather than in ordinary sentences.

⁂ Asterism: three asterisks instead of a blank line

The asterism (⁂) is made of three asterisks arranged in a triangle. It was used, for example, to show a break between sections of a text. Today the same job is usually done by a blank line, a horizontal line or an ordinary row of asterisks ***.

The asterism is not dead; you can still find it in typography, but most readers would not even be able to name it in an ordinary book. Yet it has a simple function: a quiet signal that the story has just jumped ahead a little.

A reversed question mark for rhetorical questions

In the 16th century, the English printer Henry Denham promoted a mark like a reversed question mark, called the percontation point. It was meant to separate a rhetorical question from a real request for an answer. That sounds practical: "Do you really think I believed that?" is often not a real question.

But the new mark did not catch on. Readers could usually recognize a rhetorical question from the context, and printers had no reason to add another special character to every set of type. We should distinguish it from later proposals for irony punctuation: their function was not the same.

A mark for irony? It sounds great – but it never really caught on

Imagine the sentence Wonderful. Another homework assignment. Without a voice and facial expressions, it may not be immediately clear whether the writer is really delighted. That is why some writers wanted to add a special irony mark to punctuation. At the end of the 19th century, the French writer Alcanter de Brahm proposed one; other proposals followed later.

Why did they not succeed? Irony often works precisely because it is ambiguous. And a new symbol only makes sense when a large part of readers share its meaning. If almost nobody knows it, the writer has to explain it – and then they might as well write that they meant it ironically.

‽ Interrobang: a question mark and an exclamation mark in one

In 1962, the American typographer and advertising man Martin K. Speckter proposed the interrobang (‽), a combination of a question mark and an exclamation mark. It suits questions that also express shock, outrage or surprise: You paid HOW MUCH‽

The interrobang made it into some typefaces and still has its place in Unicode today. Even so, ordinary English has mostly not accepted it. When we want the same meaning, we simply write ?! or !?. Technology was able to preserve the new mark, but readers' habits won.

Did you know? — The ‽ sign has its own Unicode code, U+203D. So a computer can store it as a single mark, even though you will not find it directly on most keyboards.

Punctuation on the internet: the change never ended

Try comparing Fine., Fine! and Fine.... The meaning of the word has not changed, but the tone sounds different. In text messages, full stops, exclamation marks and the three dots have gained new social meanings. Emoji, capital letters and repeated characters help them.

That does not mean we have abolished the rules. A specialist article or a maturita essay comes with different expectations than a chat message. But from the point of view of language history, we are watching the same thing as with the old scribes: people are looking for a way to capture something of living speech in writing.

A sentence that plays with you

Punctuation can save the meaning, but it can also create a joke. English teachers often show the sentence Let's eat, Grandma! and, after removing the comma, Let's eat Grandma!. Without the comma, the boundary between addressing someone and the object of the sentence changes. So it is not just about correctness: sometimes a comma literally saves Grandma.

Another well-known example is the Oxford comma, the comma before the final and in a list. In American English some style guides recommend it; in Britain it is treated in different ways. The sentence I invited my parents, Taylor Swift and Sherlock Holmes can jokingly sound as if the speaker's parents were the famous guests; an extra comma can make the list clearer. But we cannot claim that there is a single universal English norm: the meaning, the chosen style and the publisher's rules decide.

It is also good for students to compare Wait!, Wait? and Wait.... A single word has gained three different communicative functions. It is not just a question of grammar, but also of tone, attitude and the relationship between people. This is exactly where the history of punctuation naturally meets today's chats and messages.

Conclusion: small marks, great power

Punctuation looks like a finished list of rules that you just have to memorize. In reality it keeps developing: some marks have become a matter of course, others survive only in typography handbooks, and others are waiting for their chance in digital communication. So if you ever see the symbol ‽, it may not be a mistake in the text. You may just be meeting one of the most ambitious question marks in the history of English.