Thread by @JessZafarris

#NationalPunctuationDay⁉️

Awesome❗️

Here are some etymolog-ish things you might not know about punctuation. 🧵👇

https://twitter.com/LeagueOfLexicon/status/1441390014693261312

The word "punctuation" is from the Latin pungere "to prick or pierce"—also the source of pungent, poignant, punch, puncture and pink!

It originally referred to psalm-pointing. The dots and marks used to notate psalms evolved into the symbols we use to punctuate writing today.

The word "period" comes from the Latin periodus, meaning either a period of time (which is from the same source) or in this case, "a complete sentence."

Over time, a period became a mark that signified when a complete sentence had come to an end.

"Comma" is originally from the Greek komma, literally “cut off," though it was also used to mean "a clause in a sentence or a line of poetry."

So a comma indicates a pause or literally "a cutting off" of a phrase that is part of a whole sentence or a line of verse.

The name of an exclamation point is pretty self-explanatory, from Latin exclamare "to cry out."

But what you may not know is that for a short time in the mid-1800s, exclamation points were known as "shriek-marks," which we should definitely revive.

The interrobang (‽) was proposed by Martin K. Speckter, head of ad agency Martin K. Speckter Associates, Inc., in 1962 as a tool for copywriters to ask surprised rhetorical questions.

“Bang” was printer/programmer jargon for an exclamation point.

The inverted exclamation point ¡ (which is used in Spanish and related languages*) was actually first proposed in 1668 by English clergyman John Wilkins, who thought it should be used at the end of a sentence to denote irony or sarcasm.

French poet Alcanter de Brahm alternatively proposed this "point d’ironie," which was designed to be "whiplike," much like irony itself.

A backwards question mark ⸮, called a "percontation point," which is visually similar to the Arabic question mark (؟), was proposed by Henry Denham in the 1580s to denote rhetorical questions.

*The use of inverted exclamation ¡ and question marks ¿ at the beginning of sentences and question phrases in Spanish and related languages was recommended by the Royal Spanish Academy in 1754, and they were widely adopted by the late 19th century.

A hyphen (-), the shortest type of dash, is used to create compound words and adjective phrases (get-together, good-looking, hot-headed) and in number phrases like forty-two. 

The Greek word hyphen meant “together” or "in one,” so the symbol joins two things together into one.

The next longest type of dash is the en dash (–). An en dash is used in place of the word “through” and can be used to signify things like spans of time or page numbers.

Examples:

Apr. 23–Aug. 29
pp. 26–143

(We'll get to etymology in a moment.)

The em dash—which is twice as long as an en dash—is used to create a strong break in the flow of a sentence, or to enclose a clause within a sentence.

See what I did there?

It's often said that en and em dashes are so called because they are the width of the letters N and M.

That’s partially true.

An em is a typographic unit of measurement that is the width of a letter M printing block in a given typeface.

An 'en' is half as long as an 'em.'

In many typefaces, the letter N is not exactly half the width of the M, so an en dash doesn't directly correspond to the width of the N, but instead is relative to the size of the em.

But its name does play off of the idea that the lower case letter N looks like half of an M.

Apostrophes came to English from French. The word "apostrophe" is from the Greek apostrephein, "to turn away," literally suggesting that an omitted letter has been sent away from the word.

This is obvious with contractions, but it's ALSO true of possessives…

In Old and Middle English, possession was usually indicated by adding the ending -es to the word (Middle English: "the knyghtes sword").

With French influence, the E was dropped and replaced with an apostrophe, which showed where the letter had been omitted.