The Origin and Purpose of the Exclamation Mark

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The exclamation mark's origin and purpose date back to a scholar in Italy who felt the need for a sign to differentiate exclamations from statements or questions. This scholar, a lawyer and humanist, observed that people were misinterpreting exclamations and wrote a treatise on punctuation to address this issue. He proposed a new sign to indicate emphasis, which eventually became the exclamation 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!

Florence Hazrat's Website

An Admirable Point

How Minds Change

David McRaney’s Twitter

YANSS Twitter

Show Notes

Newsletter