Did you know the origin story of these punctuation marks?

Last week, after an appropriate hat-tip to a Twitter account called The Cultural Tutor, I had written about the origins of punctuation marks — the origins and use of full stops, parentheses, hyphens, dashes and the like. Let’s complete the exercise by looking at a few more of these essential tools for clear written communication.

One of the most ubiquitous punctuation marks in the age of the Internet is the Slash (/ or ): you can’t type a URL without it. From last week, readers may remember that the / symbol started off in the Medieval Age as a comma. Once replaced by “,” it became known as an oblique stroke, modernised in the informal Swinging 1960s into the term “slash”. Who could have known this centuries-old obsolete punctuation mark would have found a new lease of life in the computer era?

An amusing sidelight: at one time the slash did serve a useful purpose in British English, before the Internet found a new use for it. Before decimalisation of the currency, the British had to deal in pounds, shillings and pence. The symbol ‘/’ was used in the United Kingdom to separate shillings from pence when writing out sums of money: thus “2/6” meant two shillings and six pence, whereas “5/-“ meant five shillings exactly. Once the British decided life would be easier with a hundred pence in a pound, the slash fell into disuse, until the Internet era came to its rescue!

Another punctuation mark that has found a new lease of life in the Internet era, and more specifically in Twitter, is the Ampersand (&). The symbol is a morph of the Latin word “et”, meaning “and”. Since, as Twitterati know, one is limited by the number of characters one can use in a message, “&” has become a useful way of reducing three characters to one. The history of the name is also curious: apparently the “&” was often added to the end of the alphabet, read aloud as “and per se &”, which was abbreviated into “ampersand”. A long term for a space-saving mark!

The most famous revival, though, without which we couldn’t send email, is the “@” in our email IDs. Oddly, it’s a very old symbol from the medieval era: in Bulgaria, it stood for the “A” in “amen”, it was an abbreviation for “arroba” (a weight) in Spain and for “amphora” (a unit of volume) in Venice. By the 17th century @ was being used as short for “at” in France ­— and that’s where we’re @!

For those who believe there’s nothing new under the sun, the Hashtag (#) is also antique — it was morphed from the letters “lb”, short for the Latin “libra pondo” or “pound weight”. From a symbol for pound weight the hash was widely used in business accounts, and then as a general number sign, before its social media reinvention.

The asterisk (*) has also found an extra use in social media, since placing one on either side of a word on WhatsApp types the word in bold. But its origins go back to the 2nd century BC when Aristarchus of Samothrace used them to correct mistakes in Homer. The Cultural Tutor tells us that the asterisk is “perhaps the oldest unchanged punctuation mark”.

The Apostrophe (‘) was borrowed from 15th century Italy as an “elision marker” to stand for a missing letter (“loved” could be rendered by poets as “lov’d”). The possessive apostrophe followed: apparently, before its invention, a “King’s throne” had to be written as “Kinges throne”, until the apostrophe made it “King’s”.

We’ve used a lot of quotation marks in this article. “These started as notations in the margins of medieval manuscripts,” says the Cultural Tutor, “either to indicate emphasis or to indicate that somebody else had [first] said it.” (Like this!)

As the Tutor points out, these punctuation marks are in English, but can be used differently in other languages, and some languages have different marks altogether that are rarely used in English. But what’s remarkable is that these symbols, invented by scholarly monks and medieval librarians, have survived through the ages to be essential in printing, then adapted in computing, and are now finding new use on our smartphones!

wknd@khaleejtimes.com