Thanks to the casual sensibility of social media, we seem to be living in a punctuation-optional age. But in On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World, scholar Florence Hazrat offers a lively defense of the squiggles, slashes and dots that have helped define human language since civilization’s early days. Though Hazrat’s premise might sound puritanical, she quickly disavows readers of any sense that she’s a pinched grammarian. “The truth is, I really don’t care about correctness: I care about how we express our meaning in the most persuasive way,” she writes. “That sometimes means stretching the bounds of the linguistically acceptable.” Spirited expression, she suggests, is helped, rather than hindered, by the rich varieties of meaning that punctuation affords. “If words are the bare bones of text,” Hazrat notes, “punctuation marks are the muscles, sinews, and skin, making the skeleton move in subtle ways.”
In the tradition of Lynne Truss’ 2003 bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves, On the Mark is a playful book, one in which Hazrat seems keen to demonstrate the promise of punctuation by deftly deploying it herself. “The semicolon is a dreamy kind of mark for meandering minds,” she muses. “Those looking for nuance; exploration; plunging into the stream of thought without the absolute need for the clear-cut precision of page-pricking periods.”
Hazrat is aware, of course, that semicolons are widely viewed as pretentious. “All they do is show you’ve been to college,” Kurt Vonnegut famously declared. His wry remark underscored more broadly how a focus on punctuation can seem elitist. But Hazrat, whose earlier book, An Admirable Point, offered a colorful history of the exclamation mark, frames punctuation as a populist invention. As written language spread, punctuation evolved to help a larger circle of readers understand what was on the page. “Punctuation,” Hazrat writes, “is a natural outgrowth of our evolution as a species.”
In this way, those little periods, parentheses and dashes are a wonder. So, for that matter, is On the Mark.