Punctuation is more than a set of rules. In her book On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World (Bookshop\|Amazon), writer Florence Hazrat traces the history of those dots and squiggles, showing how they convey tone and intention and shape the interaction between writer and reader. In antiquity punctuation was sometimes regarded as a crutch for amateurs. Renaissance writers employed it to add feeling and voice to a written passage. The dash, for example, arrived to show interruption, hesitation, or thoughts changing direction, a sense reflected in the German word for “dash,” Gedankenstrich, or literally “thought stroke.” Not everyone approved. Eighteenth-century grammarian Joseph Robertson derided dashes as the mark of hasty and incoherent writers, and Jonathan Swift mocked the use of “numerous breaks and dashes.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Punctuation Dash as “Thought Stroke”: A History of the Dash”
Listening to A Way with Words that show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
As the writer Florence Hazrat observes, in school, we’re taught to think of punctuation as a set of rules or, as she puts it, the invisible ushers of the sentence, simply telling words where to sit.
But in reality, those dots and lines and squiggles do a whole lot more than just organized text.
And in her new book called On the Mark, Hazrat traces the history of punctuation and also shows how it conveys tone and attitude and intention and how those tiny marks shape the interaction between writer and reader.
She notes that the role of punctuation has developed over the centuries.
For example, in antiquity, there was even a class element to punctuation because elite Greek and Roman readers regarded punctuation as kind of a crutch for amateurs.
You know, if you were properly educated, you should be able to find the structure for yourself.
And so adding punctuation to text to make it easier to read also meant opening it up to more people.
And then during the Renaissance, the role of punctuation expanded even more, helping writers to put feeling and voice onto the page.
And then later, the dash was introduced to show interruption or hesitation or thoughts changing direction, which is reflected, by the way, in the German word for dash, is, which literally translates as a thought stroke.
I don’t know about you, Grant, but I find those marks really handy, but dashes have always had their critics even before the age of AI.
For example, in the eighteenth century, a grammarian named Joseph Robertson complained that dashes were the mark of hasty and incoherent writers, and they were roundly condemned as the mark of cheap pamphlets and silly romance novels.
And even Jonathan Swift mocked the dash in this little ditty that goes, in modern wit, all printed trashes set off with numerous breaks and dashes.
So from the ancient Greeks to modern days, people have been snobby about punctuation one way or the other.
Well said.
Well said.
Well, you’ll find all this and more in Florence Hazrat’s book.
It’s called On the Mark, and it’s this up close and personal look at punctuation sort of like Robert Hook putting that tiny period under a microscope.
We’ll put a link to the book on our website at waywordradio.org.
And you know, Martha and I love to get recommendations for what to read next.
There’s still a little bit of room on our bedside tables.
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