A 5,000 Year History of Punctuation: Interview with Florence Hazrat

Yeah, I mean, we can close with this.

You may find this interesting, just some weird quirk of punctuation.

Something you said sparked this in my mind.

One of my personal weird punctuation quirks is when I text, this is not so much in handwriting.

I mean, I do very little handwriting these days, as most of us do.

But I actually find for question marks... and exclamation points to put a space after the sentence.

And depending on what I inflect, like hear the inflection in my voice, I'll probably double it and double the question mark.

And, you know, I've seen people do this.

It's not just me, but I've never thought about why people do it, who are the kinds of people that do it.

Um, but it's very, very consistent for me.

Like something about the space between the final word and the question, like how, see, I would not put a double question mark.

Like, how are you? That's like too simple.

But if I'm like, how are you? If like something, you know, really big happened or you had some big emotional event space, double question mark.

Oh, God, right.

I have so much to say about that.

Can we talk for another hour?

Yeah.

From the top of my head, I would say two things here.

Of course, we are used to we are getting used to reading on this very slim device, which partially is.

kind of approaching this standardized size of a novel, you know, a paperback novel.

And books for 2,000 years now have been kind of the size.

So it's something that really fits nicely into our hand.

Okay, fair enough.

But still, the screen is much smaller, it's much slimmer.

And then I think spaces become even more important for picking out words and maybe creating emphasis now that everything is so bunched together and scrunched up.