INTHEBEGINNINGWASTHEWORD, and the word was run together. Ancient texts (like the Greek of the Gospel of John) had few of the devices that tell readers where words begin and end (spaces), which words are proper names (the upper-lower case distinction), where breaks in meaning come (commas, dashes, semicolons and full stops), who said what (inverted commas), and so on. 

Most people take punctuation to be something obvious and settled. In fact, the system is in a bit of upheaval. The beginnings of that date back to 1971, when Ray Tomlinson sent an experimental message between two computers in the same room, connected only by ARPANET (the precursor to the internet).

Tomlinson, who died on March 5th, made a lasting contribution to the world’s orthography by choosing the @ symbol for e-mail addresses. His legacy will be a long one. E-mail and the @ sign have conquered the world: you cannot truly say you speak a foreign language until you can give your e-mail address complete with the local word for the glyph, like snabel-a (“elephant-trunk A”) in Danish or aapenstartje (“little monkey’s tail”) in Dutch.


It seems that Tomlinson opened a Pandora’s box. As communication using computers proliferated, so did people’s recourse to those lesser-used characters at the edges of their computer keyboard. In the 1990s, it was the rise of the emoticon, from the humble :-) to the more elaborate, like >:\ (a furrowed-brow look of scepticism). The use of # to signal a topic (#language), as on Twitter, has evolved as a way to send messages through a kind of second channel. Some find this #playful, and others find it #irritating, but it has its uses in condensed media like Twitter.

Other innovations may have seen their day come and go: nerds once preferred tags in the style of HTML (used to code web pages) like “<sarcasm>”. But this already seems to be on the wane, in favour of things like “*sigh*”. A *sigh* was Johnson’s reaction to another story of non-traditional writing: last year Oxford Dictionaries chose an emoji—those cartoonish faces descended from emoticons—as its “Word of the Year”. (It was the face intended to signal “tears of joy”.) Emoji aren’t really words or punctuation, but something akin to a graphical hashtag, performing a bit of the same role as tone of voice and body language in speech.

With all this flux, many people worry that skill with punctuation is disappearing: witness, after all, the way teens text and tweet not bothering to capitalise or punctuate at all. It is in fact more complicated (and interesting) than that. Not putting a full stop in a text is normal for teens in an internet message, and including it sends a separate note of annoyance or frustration on the part of the writer. Full stops can also be used for other effects, like “You. Must. Be. Joking.”

Such chaos is not all that historically unusual. The first English writers, when they punctuated at all, availed themselves of long-forgotten symbols like the diastole and trigon, the interpunct and the diple. Printing began the process of settling the punctuation system, but even that took four centuries. Samuel Johnson’s commas, in the mid-18th century, were not only heavy; many would be ungrammatical today, and this style persisted into the first editions of The Economist in 1843.

As David Crystal, a linguist, points out in his history of punctuation (“Making a Point”) published in 2015, at the dawn of the 19th century, punctuation prescribers were still divided into those who insisted that punctuation follow grammar and those who wanted it to aid elocution. Even one of the grammarians, Lindley Murray, wrote in 1795, in a hugely influential grammar book, that a semicolon signalled a pause twice as long as a comma; that a colon was twice as long as a semicolon; and that a full stop was twice as long as a colon. (Try that next time you read a text aloud.)

Punctuation, in other words, has not always been the epitome of order that some of its fans think. It is unsurprising that the rise of computers would unsettle a system that had barely settled to begin with. Fortunately, most of the upheaval is confined to new channels: e-mail, texting, Twitter and whatever is to come next. Even most teens know to keep it out of formal writing. And those who prefer not to follow fads at all need only wait a while: much of today’s playful punctuation will soon become unfashionable, dead as the diastole and the diple.