How often do you use the interrobang, asterism or SarcMark? Do you ever find yourself scrolling to find the perfect emoji? Or perhaps you might feel frustrated by the overuse of punctuation?!?

In this week’s podcast, we discuss new punctuation. In a world awash with corporate-speak and scare quotes, what should we add or remove from conventional punctuation and how could it be optimised? We consider punctuation we would like to borrow from other languages, Nick coins a new term for an emoji and we discuss the history of proposed punctuation that didn’t quite stick. Finally, we reveal our favourite pieces of punctuation...

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

• User Guidelines and Netiquette by Arlene H. Rinaldi
• Uncommon punctuation marks and how to use them
• Emojipedia
• Punctuation that failed to make its mark
• The 14 common types of punctuation in English

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Jordan Fermanis, Nick Hare, and Tom Spence of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing what's wrong with punctuation. Nick, what's wrong with punctuation? Well, we were having a chat on Slack the other week, and Peter, who obviously, couldn't be here today, made this point that there are some phrases which are really useful, but which are still somehow awful at the same time. Things like value offer, you know, all that kind of business speak, you know what I mean? And you want to use it because it's the right phrase, but at the same time, you want to distance yourself from it. Now, it's not quite scare quotes, because scare quotes are like, almost you're not really committing to the thing at all. What are scare quotes? Scare quotes are when you, you know, if you say... You just did an air quote. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm getting to, I was just practicing, just getting my fingers warmed up.

Should we narrate what we can see Nick doing for the listeners?

It's when you don't, you don't agree with what's being said. So if I were to say something like, oh yeah, and you know, there was an attack by freedom fighters. Okay. Using scare quotes. So they're scare quotes. I'm saying, I'm not committing, I'm actively not committing to this. So they're ironic air quotes. Right. But this is when you kind of want to do that, but you actually do mean what you're saying. You just sort of hate the phrase. Anyway, that's the point. He said that we should get some new punctuation marks for that kind of use of sort of not quite scare quotes. It's more, you know, non-ironic, ironic usage. Anyway, so it got us thinking about, well, what actually, if we were going to fix, what's missing from punctuation? What, you know, what would we add if we could and could, you know, what, how do we, what's punctuation for and, and, you know, how will we optimize it? And how is it changing with things like emojis? Okay. There's lots of different interesting questions there. Yeah. We just, we're just emojis. Yeah. The new punctuation. I just want to say something about the word emojis. Yeah. I just want to say something because there'll be some pedants out there who'll go in the plural of emoji is emoji me, because it, I mean, it's a Japanese word and they don't have plurals. I've got a proposed usage. Yeah. Before we continue, which is that an emoji is a particular class of symbols like the smiley face. Yeah. That's an emoji. If I use it in a text message, that use of it is an emoji. Yeah. And then, and then if I talk about more than one, like the, you know, the, the smiley face and the sad face, that's emojis. That's how I'm going to be using it.

I thought this podcast was about punctuation, not grammar.

It is. But I, I just, I also think the word emojo deserves to exist as an instance of an emoji. That's it. That's all I'll say. Fine. Tom.

So I think to kick off, I've, I've got a list here that it's kind of a widely agreed upon list from a lot of, you know, English language teaching publications of the 14 common punctuation marks used in English. There are 14? Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I only use about two. So the, the, the most, the most agreed upon list is the semi-colon. Yes. The comma. Yes. Question mark, exclamation point, full stop, ellipsis. What's an ellipsis? A dot, dot, dot. Okay. You've also got a quotation. Did I say quotation marks?

Well, we got, you counted double and single.

Should I just start that list again?

No, no, you didn't say quotation marks. Keep going.

Okay. You have brackets. Yeah. Square brackets. Yeah. And curly braces. Yeah. As well as hyphens.

Rarely seen outside maths papers, the old curly braces.

No, no. So they're, they're some of the more unusual ones, but they are still considered in 114. All right. Okay. And hyphens and dashes.

Yeah. Yeah. What hyphens and dashes being this one thing or two you're saying?

Two things. Yeah. And did I say colon as well? I think I didn't. Don't think you did. I mean, you've got them in a list. Yeah. Should I just read the list from the beginning?

No, no, we get it. There's a few, there's several.

Yeah. Okay. So essentially those, those are the normal ones. The ones we, we'd all think of.

Have you got them just in a great big string of text without any punctuation? Is that the problem? Yeah. It's the problem.

So I think to add to that, or also a good start point for the conversation is the most famous invented punctuation, which is the interrobang. What's that? What's that? The interrobang is an attempt to create a piece of punctuation that indicates a question asked with intensity. So it's a merger of an exclamation mark and a question mark.

But, but we already have that because it's question mark, exclamation mark. Yeah. And not by the way, the other way around, the other way around would be preposterous. It has to go question mark, exclamation mark, but it's just an attempt to make. Maybe chuck in some caps lock in there as well. Yeah, but it's an attempt to make that into one symbol, right? But we do have that because I use it a lot. I think it's really useful.

I think, uh, agreed. And I think this is a point to consider when we're thinking about new punctuation is what do we actually need new punctuation for and what do we have, or what can we already create with our kind of modular toolkit? Yeah. We, we have letters to make words from and we can make all sorts of different words with a limited number of letters. Can we do the same with the punctuation we have now? And if not, what do we need to add to be able to make new things?

Okay. Um, let's hear from Jordan, your sort of thoughts at this point.

Um, I think one of the ones to pick up from what Tom just said, one of the, one of the parts of punctuation that I think would be valuable is, uh, something that indicates tone, like a sarcasm mark or something that where words and punctuation are sometimes too ambiguous to, to sort of specify what you, what you mean, especially, I think this is common in like texting when you're texting someone and sometimes you write something, you might say it sarcastically, but that can't really come across in a, in, in written format as well. So there are things there, there was an attempt to make a sark mark, which apparently resembles the digit six with a dot in the middle of it. Um, and was designed to, to denote sarcasm. Um, it didn't take off,

obviously. Do you know when it was designed? In the nineties. Okay. Yeah. Well, although people, forward slash S, which is designed to look like, I think like a CSS code for a particular style really has taken off. I mean, I see that a lot. Say it again. Uh, forward slash S after your statements, you make a statement, which is sarcastic. Yeah. And then you write forward slash S. So I think I, now this is, I'm outside my comfort zone here, but I think formatting like CSS formatting, you, you can put like, um, slash B for example, to, to turn bold on and then slash B to turn it off again. And so the, the idea is it's like saying I've turned on and now I'm switching off my sarcasm. So saying that, that, what that thing I just said is sarcastic. So, okay. So, so people have invented, have started using it even though we don't have, we're not using the mark, but certainly the concept is being used. So this reminds me, I've got a natural dislike of this and this reminds me of when I lived, I think one of the cool things about UK is, and we're always banging on about it, but yeah, it's quite a strong sense of sarcasm here, right? When we're just in daily conversation, I feel. Yeah. Well, sarcasm, strict irony. Irony, whatever. Um, but I remember when I lived in Spain, my, my, my Spanish flatmate there, um, every time he was being sarcastic, he would say at the end of the sentence, he would say, I'm being sarcastic. Okay. And it's usually pissed me off because it's like the whole point, I think maybe not the whole point, but the thing about sarcasm is it's kind of meant to be a little bit ambiguous. It's meant to be a little bit, um. Agreed. Yeah. And so I would, I really hate the idea that, you know, you, at the end of something, you put a slash S. Well, I think we might want to touch on why, why things like this. Yeah. I mean, I think written versus oral, but anyway, um, who wants to go next? Where are we? Who wants to have a chat? Yeah. I don't know what we're moving on to.

I think the reason that Nick invited me on this podcast is because I'm a bit of a typography, uh, potentially nerd. Uh, I think that would be an offensive term for me, but, uh, I, you know, I like, I like typefaces. I like fonts and things. And I think it's interesting that Jordan brought up a case where someone tried to create a new glyph for a marker. When, if you look into the, the, the glyph set of basically any font you have. What is a glyph? A glyph being like, uh, a symbol. Okay. You're right. A letter is a glyph. No, it is a letter. A number is a glyph. But he wants to call it a glyph. A piece of punctuation is a glyph. It's, it's just. I can think of words other than that, but keep going. A character. Um, but if you look into the, the concept of any font.

Can I just ask a question? Is a colon one glyph or two glyphs? One glyph. Right.

Yeah. Um, yeah. Anything you can press a button on a keyboard or enter a character code. Yeah. Um, it will bring up a glyph, which is the image of the character. Right. All right. In the font. Keep going with your point. Um, there are, there are all sorts of symbols in there. I mean, you've got, for example, French quotation marks, which are, uh, sets of kind of double, uh. Double chevrons pointing right and left. Yeah. Which exist in almost every font.

They're the slightly curlier ones. Is that what you mean? No.

Very slightly. Yeah. I think it depends on the font. Some will be straight, some will be curlier. Okay. But they exist and we don't use them. Could we repurpose some of these existing symbols. Yeah. For, that don't have meanings in English. Yeah. For meanings that we need rather than trying to create all new symbols.

I think they are conveying meaning, but I think I agree with Nick and that they're not replacing punctuation either. I think they're kind of, they're almost, they're almost eliminating the need for punctuation because you, you can say everything you need to say through an assortment of emojis rather than having to craft a sentence using, using punctuation, which leads me onto a

point that I can't think. Is it, is it, are they for lazy, thick people? Uh, no, I, they're just for Gen Z people. I, I think, I feel like trying to talk in emojis is a bit like when they taught ape sign language and they could get it in the sense that they could, you know, refer to a banana or refer to a person, but they wouldn't create sentences. And I think, you know, the limitations of emojis, uh, as a kind of means of communication by themselves is, is that they don't have a grammar really, you know, in that. So you just can't, words are still better. Um, it's a bit like, um, um, music, like written music. It's, you know, if you just show us chord structures, for example, you, um, you know, notation, musical notation is useful because it's got all sorts of nuances in there that you don't get from things like tablature. Yeah. I think, yeah, like music,

I think the cool thing for me about emojis in a sense is that they are universal and that anyone, no matter what language you can speak, can understand them, even though I think they're probably used differently depending on the context. Yeah. But yeah, there is something maybe nice about trying to create something that everyone can understand rather than having to

interesting points in both Nick's and Jordan's, uh, discussions that, that kind of bring us back onto the punctuation point. So Jordan, you said that you thought emojis were replacing words, but also removing the need for punctuation, which I think is a very interesting point because in a way emojis are the ideograms, right? They are images representing an idea. And sometimes you can use them as phonograms as well to represent a sound, but essentially they are a hieroglyphic language. And if you look at ancient hieroglyphic languages like Egyptian, they also did not use punctuation. So it has almost represented a full circle to the point where, because you're no longer using a kind of a modularized language system with letters, do you need punctuation? Um, to me that sounds like regression, but anyway, go on. In some ways it could be, but you know, if it's useful for other things. Exactly. Um, and Nick, to your point on fonts, I like a font. Um, I think you're correct to say fonts don't change the meaning of a word, but they can absolutely change the interpretation and can fonts in some senses play the role of punctuation. I mean, we don't think of, for example, using boldface or italics as punctuation, but it certainly changes the way you would read a sentence. You know, you read a sentence in bold and it sounds more forceful, more shouty. Do we need, uh, uh, a typeface change like italics or, or bold to represent sarcasm rather than punctuation?

Brilliant. So this, because I was, that was one of the things I was thinking about was that we did, we do have prosodic stress, which is what, um, stressing a word. Okay. So when you, when you go, oh no, I, I haven't had breakfast yet, but it implies that you've had something else, right? Uh, that's prosodic stress. And we do have that. Obviously we have italics or bold, um, you know, even if you're going crazy. Um, but we don't have any means in English to indicate phonemic stress, which in some cases could be important. That's where there's, because English has stress as a phonemic. So in other words, if there's a difference between construct and construct, we don't have a means of indicating that. I, I suspect that in almost every case, uh, it's obvious from the context, but it might be possible. Like, let's say you wanted to call your company, you wanted to call your company construct with a K or constructly. Um, and, uh, you know, you might want to indicate to people that actually we're construct, we're not construct, we're construct, but there's no way of doing that in English. So yeah, no, just, that's something I was thinking about. Okay. Um, all right. Um, we're sort of most of the way through there. Um, where are we? Well, actually I've got a few more. I know we're being a bit rambly. I don't have a few more proposed. I think this is what we need to hear about. Yeah. But I'm not committing myself to any of these. Right. I'm just reporting them. Um, so just a few things that actually exist. You should commit yourself to them for a month. I'll try. I'll try and start using. Well, it's interesting that some of them have emerged of their own accord, right? So I'll get to that in a sec, but, um, there is a thing called, these exist already, but not in English, right? There's a thing called an asterism, which is the three dots you might've seen in sort of, um, type setting sometimes, which indicate a paragraph or a sentence divider. Um, whereas we just use a space, but you could use a, you could, you can imagine just letting the text run on and just saying three dots. Why would you do that though? Well, save space or something. Well, there was a paper shortage. Yeah, but in the old days there was. So, okay. One thing I really like and believe we could make use of is the old inverted, um, exclamation marks and question marks, which the Spanish and Austrians have. I think they are so stupid. I was about to go on. Because even the Spanish and Austrians think they're stupid as well. No, because if you had a really long question, you might not know it was a question until you got so greedy. It's to do with how your language operates. I agree. No, I think it's useful. East, uh, now, and the other interesting thing I didn't realize, a lot of East Asian languages, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, for example, didn't have punctuation till we brought it over. The West brought punctuation. So they gave us, you know, tea and gunpowder and we gave them the question mark. Yeah. Nice. Um, anyway, so other proposed new punctuation marks, which don't exist, but could, um, are, um, so irony mark was proposed by Herve Bazin, uh, in an essay where he proposed a load. And we have that now. I wonder if he did that ironically. It wasn't really sort of. Yeah, but we got, we discussed that as the forward slash S. Yeah. The question comma, which was again, another thing like the interrobang. But again, we have that because we have question mark exclamation mark. Um, the rhetorical question, I think this is a good one. This was proposed by Henry Denham in the 16th century. And that would be just a backwards exclamation, a backwards question mark, which would say that you were not really asking the question. You were sort of using it rhetorically. Love point. The love point is two question marks back to back. However, we have that as basically the heart emoji. What's that for? Just to sort of express a warm feeling. Now I know why when you're emailing me with, now I understand. Yeah. All the little heart emojis. Now I understand. Yeah. It's like just, you express warmth in the same way you would express, you know, forcefulness with an exclamation mark. It's good, isn't it? Then the acclamation point, which we don't really have, which is where you're, it's like different from an exclamation mark in that it's expressing commitment to the thing you're saying. Viva España. But with an acclamation mark, which looks like a little V made of exclamation marks. Um, it's like saying, it's not, you're not shouting Viva España. You're saying Viva España. Hooray. I'm supporting this. Um, and then the certitude point, right? Again, one of Bazan's suggestions, which is where you're saying you're sure of something. Now we do have that as well, which is when you finish the sentence and then write in all caps, fact, full stop after it. But this would be, this would be a symbol which would do the trick. Okay. There you go. There's

like that. Rather than having to use ellipses, you know, you can, or, you know, clarify that you slightly edited a quote. You can make it clear in the punctuation. I did not know how much I

needed that until today. Does that, we, we're going to need that. Let's do that. Let's bring

that back. As I said, we've already got lots of spare, uh, quotation mark symbols. We've got the French ones. We've got German inverted ones. We've also got, uh, you know, curly or straight ones. Any typesetter will tell you, you should be using curly ones, but maybe straight quotation

marks should be used for. No, I think that when you say inverted quotation marks in Germany,

do they go at the bottom? The first goes at the bottom and the last goes at the top. Yeah. So,

so, but we just have the bottom on both ends, I think works brilliantly. Yeah. I would totally go with that. Okay. Look, I think it's been quite an interesting little sort of, um, um, walk around, around this subject. Just to, in terms of the, I've got a question, but go on. No, this is more about what's, so if you think in general terms about the types of what's it, what's punctuation for it's to add, um, you know, add, uh, precision to what you're saying to remove ambiguity, essentially. Um, and so, you know, you, you've got vagueness, uh, in what types of vagueness do we have in language? Well, I think one of them is that where you're not, you could plausibly referring to a number of different types of thing, but I think that's what words do. Words do that pretty well. So when I say the queen, you know, if it's going to be ambiguous, I can use other words to tell you which one I'm referring to, but I think what we, um, they are kind of in general missing is sort of context markers. So these would tell you about the situation the speaker is in and possibly even their mood. So for example, if I could write, um, a, if I was inebriated and writing an email, I might want to indicate that not by saying, uh, but that maybe wobbly writing or something, some way that I did that exactly the other day. I was texting someone and then afterwards I'd say I'm completely drunk. Yeah. So I could have done with that. It'd be because then you'll sort of say, or if you say, oh, I'm angry or even online, you, if you could, if you could write in such a way, you say I'm British. If you could indicate that. It'd be good to circumvent it. Peter would help be able to help us with some kind of like brain implant that detected that and automatically did it as you typed. But anyway. Yeah. Um,

I think Nick has almost come full circle here to the point I made earlier about how fonts can change the way you interpret things. And if you, if you write a sentence in Comic Sans or in, uh, in Thriller font, it'll be interpreted differently. Right. And I think what you're

talking about there is a drunk font. Yeah. We need to standardize around something. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay. So I've got a question to ask. Um, really simple one. What's your favorite punctuation mark? Who wants to go first? Jordan. I think a comma. Okay. The humble

comma. Yeah. It's quite vanilla. Tell us about it. Yeah. Go on. Um, well, I like, I like writing them. I think there's something, I think there's something nice about the way they break up the speech. That's not so definitive as a full stop. And it kind of, it sort of tells you there's something more to come, but it doesn't tell you how much or how little, or it's not very tantalizing. Yeah. It's a bit of a tease. Yeah, it is. It is. And there's sort of the people use them in different ways of the Oxford comma, obviously. And they get, there's something nice and kind of free form about them. Yeah. Saturday nights are for full stops, but Friday

nights are for commas. I think that's what they say. Um, I think rather predictably and boringly. I do like a semicolon. Um, I think a lot of people would say that. I think I'm not necessarily not saying here today, but yeah, they're just that useful for stuff that is connected, but not quite as connected as you might think. Or it's, you know, it's, there's a little bit of space there that I kind of, I'm not explaining. I'm going, I'm going off semicolons. I was a massive semicolon a few years ago. I am beginning to find that they encourage ponderousness. I'm, I've, I think I, I, I get criticized, uh, in my writing sometimes for having quite long sentences with, without things like commas and things. But I think that's because I've probably been reading a bit too much Cormac McCarthy and, uh, have decided that I prefer that I prefer to have a big load of words fired at me. And then, um, you know, and then I kind of sort them out. It's more fun than having to read through. Oh, he's pausing now. And now we've got a bit of a thought and you imagine the person sucking on their pipe all through this flipping semicolon and then he finally gets it to the side and it's something boring, you know? So I, I, yeah, I've kind of gone off them a bit, I think. Okay. Are you saying your favorite punctuation is no punctuation? I don't know. I haven't quite decided yet. We'll get to that. Stream of consciousness.

Yeah, Tom. Well, I think the, the M dash is probably my favorite. What's an M dash? It's a slightly

longer dash than an N dash. This was not in your list of 14, although to be fair, that was like the most common ones. Yeah, yeah. So, so, so it's not a short dash, it's a long dash. Yeah, a slightly longer dash. So when would you use that? I feel annoyed actually. When would you use that rather than a short dash? When you want a slightly longer dash. Go on, now, why, when, what? To

indicate a slightly longer pause because you're, you're typesetting and it will fit better in that location. It's quite a flexible piece of punctuation. I think it's a pinterest pause

in your sentence rather than a frenetic sort of jump cut. Gotta get to the next thing. Yeah,

yeah. Not convinced. It's, it's rarely used enough that it's a little bit ill-defined, so you have a little bit of freedom as to how you use it. Of course, we didn't talk about now

it's good, it's part of the tradition. It's a big, it's a big problem. Do you want us to all laugh,

so you can have it as like a stopgap? Of course I do, of course I do. Right, we'll stop there. As always, thanks for listening. If you have any thoughts or suggestions for topics, you can email us at podcast at alephinsights.com. We'd love to hear from you. If you've enjoyed the podcast, Nick, what should you do? Like and subscribe, full stop. Exactly. All right. Thanks always for listening. I'm Fraser McGruer. I've been here with Tom Spence, Jordan Fermanis, and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.