Florence Hazrat's new book, On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World, offers a lavishly researched history of punctuation, arguing that dots and dashes are an essential component of style and the architecture of thought. The book covers everything from medieval monks to Donald Trump, examining how punctuation has shaped writing and meaning.
Exclamation Marks: From Nazi Propaganda to Shakespeare
Hazrat notes that the Nazis loved exclamation marks, with Joseph Goebbels pencilling in triplets of them into a speech for Hitler. The modern German linguist Konrad Ehlich is described as believing that "slapping exclamation marks on to the end of statements turns all utterance into shouting, and all thinking into order." However, Hazrat also derides male scholars who complained about previous editors inserting exclamation marks into the speech of Beowulf on the grounds that it feminises the hero.
Hazrat's own ultra-liberal use of exclamation marks may betray her true feelings. She writes, "No such thing as binge-reading the Bible for an early-medieval monk!" and "Let nobody claim punctuation wasn't sexy!" Yet she also offers a nuanced observation: "All Shakespearean tragedies have at least one exclamation mark, while the six comedies and two history plays don't have any at all. It's not farfetched to conclude that, for Shakespeare and his contemporaries, exclamations were an expression of intense distress, rather than 'screechy' hysteria."
The Renaissance and the Birth of the Semicolon
The book traces the great Renaissance flourishing of innovative marks designed to guide readers through rhythm and tone. The semicolon, for example, was created by Venetian master printer Aldo Manuzio, who hung a sign on his door reading: "Whoever you are, Aldo asks you again and again what it is you want from him. State your business briefly, and then immediately go away."
Writers have always guarded their punctuation fiercely. Charles Baudelaire famously wrote, "I absolutely insist on this comma," when restoring a removed comma on a page proof of Les Fleurs du Mal. Hazrat shows how editors who remove commas or dashes do so at their peril, citing the example of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, where the first editor's addition of commas did violence to the breathless dynamism of the prose.
Punctuation in the Digital Age: Trump, Emoji, and AI
The book ends in the present, when "it is tech giants who choose our writing tools," and when ending a text message with a full stop comes off as rude. Hazrat correctly observes that emoji are not a language but perhaps a form of punctuation, an expansion of affective possibilities at the end of a sentence.
Most interestingly, she presents Donald Trump as a master of the rhetorical strategies afforded by punctuation, with his Goebbels-like addiction to exclamation marks and his creative use of scare quotes to imply that Obama was not really the president or to draw attention to his own ridiculous euphemisms (his war was "our lovely 'stay' in Iran").
More depressingly, Hazrat analyses the addiction of AI language models to the em dash. She surmises, "the models have deliberately been trained to seem human by imitating the spontaneity of voice – precisely why dashes were so interesting to Renaissance playwrights like Ben Jonson." She questions whether their ubiquity heralds an imminent "near-total abandon of thinking work."
On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World by Florence Hazrat is published by Basic Books (£28).
