Contempt of quote: The fight to save punctuation

{ CHARACTER ARC } VIGILANTES WITH A RED PEN

- Gowri S

In the 3rd century BCE, the Greeks wrote without any spaces, punctuations or distinction between capital letters or lowercase.

To the modern eye this would look like undecipherable code: just capital letters scribbled together continuously on stone tablets and scrolls.

Understanding unfamiliar documents on the first read was a struggle, so the humble dot was introduced to break the stream of text. The suggestion, by a librarian in Alexandria, was a breakthrough. The dots represented pauses but not the grammatical boundaries of punctuation today.

It was only by the 7th century CE that these dots were distinguished according to their placement (low, middle and high) to represent short, medium or long pauses, as well as horizontal strokes in between sections. Later, it was grammarians and printers who systemised these symbols in order to understand the semantics on the page.

Today, the usage of punctuation has evolved, sometimes even erroneously, to the extent that some are considered endangered (the semicolon is believed to be on the path of a slow death, while the apostrophe remains commonly misused).

There are now collectives striving to preserve the use of correct punctuation, and new symbols are being designed to resist the homogenisation of language by AI, even as newer, younger, communities debate their role in online communication.

(For a fun, mid-story exercise, count the number of punctuation marks in this story.)

Grammar guardians

One man's frustration with the misuse of punctuation, sparked a movement to protect the symbol. In 2001, a miffed British journalist named John Richards started the Apostrophe Protection Society (APS).