YANSS 278 – Florence Hazrat on the history of punctuation and why the exclamation point was invented after the question mark!
On this episode we learn about the history of the exclamation point, the question mark, and the semicolon (among many other aspects of language) with Florence Hazrat, a scholar of punctuation, who, to my great surprise, informed me that while a lot of language is the result of a slow evolution, a gradual ever-changing process, punctuation in the English language is often an exception to this – for instance, a single person invented the semicolon; they woke up and the semicolon didn’t exist, and then went to bed that night, and it did!
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Official Description of the Book:
Ever been annoyed at one too many !!!!! on a social media post? Ever wondered whether that extra ! is too forceful, and should make way for a modest full stop ? Then An Admirable Point is for you.
The book traces the roots of ! in the manuscript culture of the late Middle Ages following its vagaries across centuries, oceans, and text media right up to its current flights of fancy in the digital soup of electric impulses we call the internet. Along the way, An Admirable Point examines how our prim and pristine Miss Jane Austen actually started as a wild exclamation marker and other ! in literature, why a well-placed ! sells for millions of dollars in art auctions, what happens in our head when we see a !, how ! helps us surf the internet, and what the promises and pitfalls of ! can be when it dips its stroke-dotted toes into politics and public life.
An Admirable Point: A Brief History of the Exclamation Mark is an unapologetic manifesto for exclaiming — exclaiming in surprise, wonder, and admiration at the world and ourselves.
Florence Hazrat is a scholar of punctuation in early modern literature. She studied at Cambridge and St. Andrews and is a BBC New Generation Thinker, a folk fiddler, and the host of Standing on
Points, a podcast about dots and dashes. She loves all
things punctuation and Shakespeare. Hazrat is based in Germany, working on punctuation in language and culture, and on Renaissance literature. Before she discovered her secret passion for the exclamation point, she was a fellow at the University of Sheffield studying brackets in early modern literature, and at the University of Geneva, working on Shakespearean translations.
“Words, words, words. I live for words, especially the unruly ones that sneak into unexpected (and uncomfortable) places. Turncoat words that mean one thing, and then another, and then again another, depending which way you turn them. Words that are inside out, themselves and one another.”
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