In this week's bonus, we talk more with Florence Hazrat, author of "On the Mark," about the surprisingly political life of punctuation. We look at how a group of Irish monks learning Latin invented the spaces between words, and how Charlemagne spread them across his empire, and how a South African poet wrote a sonnet out of empty parentheses to protest apartheid censorship.
In this week's bonus, we talk more with Florence Hazrat, author of "On the Mark," about the surprisingly political life of punctuation. We look at how a group of Irish monks learning Latin invented the spaces between words, and how Charlemagne spread them across his empire, and how a South African poet wrote a sonnet out of empty parentheses to protest apartheid censorship.
Find Florence Hazrat on Instagram or her website.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians. Thank you so much for supporting the show and being here today. We are with Florence Hazrat, author of "On the Mark," this fabulous book about all punctuation through history, in the modern day, up to everything about emoji. You're gonna love it. And, you know, one of the things we mentioned in the original, in main segment is how writing didn't originally have spaces, and I wanna follow up and hear why that is and where we got the spaces in writing. So Florence, thank you again for being here, and let's talk about where we get those spaces in our words today.
Florence: Yes. So as we said, in ancient Greece and Rome, it was just a continuous line of text, “scriptura continua” it's called. Over the centuries, people sort of lost the ability to really have a good grasp over this very complex Latin. Also, of course, they had their native languages, right? And so in very far-flung Ireland, a group of monks was copying the Bible and was trying to kind of learn Latin through copying the Bible. And they started to parse Gaelic, so Irish, with Latin. So parsing is when you have some words or syllables, and you make a note above, in your native language or in like your languages, you try to see which word is which. So you have a sentence in your own language and then the Latin sentence, and then you try to see, okay, where's which word. And that was so hard because they didn't know, again, where does a word start and end. They were just, again, non-native speakers learning Latin. And so they started to add these minuscule spaces between the words just to be able to better understand and then write the Gaelic translation above or below. And Ireland actually at the time was—this was maybe the 7th century, 6th, 7th century—and England too, a little bit later, had these great scholars. So it was far flung geographically, but actually, what they were producing were these beautiful illustrated manuscripts of theological texts that we still have. And so somehow these manuscripts with the little spaces traveled to the continent, and once we have Charlemagne in the eighth century, eighth, ninth century, who wanted to administer his vast empire and who needed standardized texts and legible handwriting as well, and who also then imported the spaces between the letters because it helps reading and makes it faster, and he has this vast empire with different native languages and different capabilities. So spaces were invented by a group of monks who wanted to learn Latin, and then it was spread by an emperor who was interested in administering his kingdom.
Mignon: Wonderful. And then everyone saw it and thought, "Well, that's a good idea," I imagine.
Florence: Exactly. Exactly.
Mignon: And you know, we talked about how all languages have punctuation, and we mentioned Arabic. It had punctuation before, but the modern punctuation is actually quite new. I was quite surprised how recently they adopted certain kinds of punctuation. Can you talk about sort of the political history of how that came about?
Florence: Yes. So Arabic requires quite a lot of education to be able to read it without any kind of help. Again, you know, punctuation helps inexperienced readers and potentially less educated readers or who didn't have these years of language schooling. So even in the mid-early 19th century, there are some Arabic scholars that say, "We are losing readers. We are losing people who know how to read Arabic." And that was, of course, the time of colonization of Arab-speaking countries. And that just continued throughout the 19th century. So at the end of the 19th century, we really have Arab speakers and scholars and writers who are very worried that Arabic is going to die out as a language in which they can write and they also have readers, because it was so difficult. And people were starting to read and write in French more and more. So French in Arab-speaking countries, and then of course English also in a country like Egypt, became more and more prominent because somehow people found that easier to do. And so these Arab intellectuals didn't want Arabic to just become ossified into something that theologians can write or scientists or somebody who's super, super educated. They were discussing how to renew Arabic while still preserving this aura around Arabic because, of course, it is the language of the Quran as well, and it is one of the ways that Pan-Arabic people identify themselves as Arabs, right, is the language. So we mustn't renew the language making it not recognizable anymore, and at the same time, it does need some dynamic change. And I'm super happy that it was a woman who suggested punctuation, a Lebanese playwright and journalist, Zainab Fawaz, in the late 19th century wrote an article in an Egyptian newspaper and said, "Let's try and import punctuation from French." To make Arabic more accessible. So I love that because it is trying to counteract the effects of colonialism, some of the parts of colonialism. So it's kind of like subversive, I feel. At first, writers and intellectuals didn't want that because they wanted something native, something their own punctuation marks. And so people started to develop other marks that had different kinds of emotions or cognitive phenomena, let's say. But then these became like 100 marks, which is much too much. You know, that's not something we can make people use or start to get to know. You know, the marks that we have, the repertoire is like between 10 and 15 or something. So in the end, they just said, "Okay, let's import the European marks." But then of course, they turned them around, right? Because Arabic is from right to left, so the belly of the comma and also the belly of the question mark, for example, are turned, are also mirrored. Now Arabic does use this, and Persian as well, they do use these marks, although they are a little bit less. So you know, Arabic has a different grammar than some European countries or English, for example, so punctuation is also connected to grammar. Does the language need these marks in order to be able to kind of follow along? So Arabic is maybe... because maybe they're a bit stronger in terms of needing commas so much. But there's question marks, exclamation marks, and so on. And so Arabic became accessible to people again through punctuation.
Mignon: Just fascinating. And you make a point, sometimes people say like punctuation maybe isn't important, but there was a case in Moscow where it was very important.
Florence: Yes, absolutely. So a comma felled the tsar, the Russian tsar. Maybe we can say that. I want to say that. It took some years, but eventually it was punctuation that introduced communism, we could say. And the story is that in 1905, some printers went on strike because they were paid less from one day to the next. So printing at the time was still very material. Now we can just press keys on our keyboard, and then we have the text, and we have the punctuation. But at the time, of course, also in Shakespeare's time, you really had to pick each and every letter out by hand, and then you had to pick the punctuation and also the blanks, the spaces between words. These were real parts that had to be put into this. And so from one day to the next, the Moscow administration said, "Okay, we're not gonna pay you anymore for the punctuation and for the spaces because that's not a letter. You know, you shouldn't be paid for something that's not important," right? But of course, it is the same hand gesture. It takes the same amount of time. And so they would lose something like one-third of their wages. And these printers went on strike, and this strike somehow inflamed the whole country, and there was a railway strike, a strike of bakers, of lawyers. Everybody was striking until they would get a constitution. So in 1905, at the end of the year, at the end of the strike, the tsar gave people the constitution that they demanded, and that was then paving the way for the Russian Revolution in 1917. I think Trotsky himself even said that punctuation is responsible for these revolutions in Russia.
Mignon: Amazing. I forgot where I was going. I got so engrossed in the story. One second. Oh. Let me see. So I mean, so... I mean, good cut. That's amazing. So another place where money came into punctuation, sort of to wrap up, is with The New York Times and ink.
Florence: Yes, exactly. So The New York Times I think was founded in 1851, but the name was The New York Times Daily, and between New and York, a hyphen as well: two punctuation marks, hyphen and period. And then in the course of 100 years, at first we lost the Daily, so it was just The New York Times, period and hyphen. And then it just became The New York Times without any period, just the hyphen. And then in the 1960s, even the hyphen went. And the thinking was that it would save ink. I think it was in the 1960s, $600, which is around $5,000 today, a year. So sometimes punctuation just falls victim to pragmatic decisions. They don't necessarily mean anything. And it's also quite normal that punctuation falls in and out of words. So like email, very few people are gonna put like a hyphen between e and mail. The reason is that 10, 15 years ago. So in a way, that is normal. And sometimes we can make a case that it has intense meaning, and it's the brewing of blankets, you know? But sometimes it's very... just very of sober calculations.
Mignon: Right. No, it makes me think of—you mentioned in the book too when there were signs in some region where they took out all the apostrophes for a practical reason, but people were upset.
Florence: Yes, this was in North Yorkshire in the UK, for example, St. Mary's Lane. You know, the computer wasn't able to really pick up the name of the street, and so the administration took out the apostrophe, but people hated that, and they wrote to newspapers, and they called their representatives, and so these apostrophes were put back in, which of course, you know, really warms my heart that people really hold onto these marks, and they have feelings about them.
Mignon: They do. You know, the change in technology made me think of website addresses too, because before the web there weren't company names, or not many, with words all scrunched together. You know, but now when I'm writing about a company, I always have to look up whether they have a space in their name or not. Like TechCrunch, for example, I am constantly looking up whether it has a space or if the words are crunched together, and they're crunched together. And I think that trend has come about largely because domain names are all run together the same way. And it does seem also like there's a trend toward less punctuation. Have you noticed that? Is that something you have noticed, that there's just a little bit less punctuation than there used to be?
Florence: In brand names or something like that?
Mignon: Just, yeah. Just in general too. You know, if you pull up a 17th or 18th or 19th century novel, it has so many more commas.
Florence: Oh, yes, of course. Yeah, that is true, and they do much more with the text. They have italics, for example, for names, and they explore the margins and titles, and there's definitely been a standardization in terms of the aesthetics of the page in the late 19th century, I think, and then going into the 20th century. And with that, with the standardization also comes a stricter attitude to punctuation, which is really sad because it doesn't have to be that way. And so a lot of people become very nervous when they write to me. They say, "Oh my God, I'm so self-conscious now about punctuation." I know that people will tell you, "Oh my God, I make lots of grammar errors and I'm writing to the Grammar Girl." But actually, that wasn't originally to be like that, so I think that's why I love the Renaissance so much because it's about eloquence. It's about how can I say something in the most evasive way. Maybe it's extra commas, right? Maybe if I put parentheses or dot-dot-dot, or I put lots of dashes to express my... the urgency of mind or something that I'm feeling. They wouldn't stigmatize that, whereas now we are stigmatizing a more expressive use of punctuation that is maybe at the edges of what's considered correct or acceptable. But I hope with this book also I can inspire people and give them a little bit of confidence to be able to venture out there.
Mignon: Yeah. You have a lot of great examples of ways that people have creatively played with punctuation in their writing. What's one favorite you'd like to end with?
Florence: Oh, I really love a poem about apartheid in South Africa and censorship because the poet, Koos Kombuis, is using just empty parentheses and then some exclamation marks and some question marks and nothing, no words at all, and he calls it "The Tippex Sonnet." So Tippex is the fluid, the correction fluid that he put or we put on the marks in order to correct them, yes, but also to hide them, right?
Mignon: Like Wite-Out?
Florence: Wite-Out, yeah. And so of course it's white that is covering Black words, right? It's just this silence of not seeing any words. It's just an empty parenthesis, but we know that there were Black words underneath, right? So it's making this point about censorship for anyone who criticizes the apartheid government and also for like white domination over Black expression, for example. And—
Mignon: I'm sorry, people watching on YouTube, I'm gonna hold it up so they can see what you're talking about. So I have the book here, and it's just a poem, but it has no words. It just has parentheses and some punctuation marks. So very interesting.
Florence: Exactly. Yeah, and after the end of apartheid, he actually wrote a poem that is celebrating the rainbow nation that South Africa is becoming, and he's filling these parentheses, or he's taking away the Wite-Out. So I really love this because it's such a striking use of punctuation to also criticize and be political. I think it's very effective as well.
Mignon: Yeah, here's the... I'll hold it up as well. It's the final, and you can see the words are now filled in where the blanks were. It's really a wonderful... And you said that at first people thought it was a printing error? Some students who got this in an exam or in a class or something like that thought it was just like a misprinting or something, right?
Florence: Exactly. It was set as a Cambridge exam to interpret, and I can completely understand that students would be freaked out by not being able to interpret anything in terms of words, right? But then once you get into it, I think you can say a lot in terms of censorship and who gets to decide what is being said or maybe what's being whispered in parentheses as well, and I think the punctuation here becomes the main character as well.
Mignon: Yeah, so creative. Well, the book is "On the Mark" by Florence Hazrat, who's here with us today, and we want you to read this book first. This is an excellent, wonderful book. But one of my favorite parts of the show is also getting the guests' book recommendations of what you should read after you finish that one. So Florence, what are some of your book recommendations for us today?
Florence: Oh, I have them here. I was so happy and pleased because I'm reading this here called "Strandings." It's about whale strandings and what they mean to us humans. And I just picked this up because there was a recent whale stranding in between Denmark and Germany, and people had very big feelings about the end of the world and this poor whale, and we need to help the whale, and so on. So I saw this book and I was, "Okay, maybe this can explain a little bit the psychology of whale strandings." And I was fascinated to hear that whale strandings talk about the relationship between people and the universe and the self-identity of people in the UK and Napoleon. And then there's a group of people who go to every whale stranding and try to get a tooth or some other bone. So it's a very interesting deep dive into something I have no idea about. I can recommend that. It's very dense also. The writing is quite poetical.
Mignon: Well, I have to say Rebecca Sebastian, our marketing person, is very into whales. If she hasn't already read that, I'm sure she's going to want to.
Florence: Oh, definitely, yes. Whales all over every page. And then I have this book, "Monsters: What Do We Do With Great Art by Bad People?" And the author is thinking about whether the knowledge about the biography of an artist can mar our enjoyment of the film or the book. For example, Roman Polanski, who has these charges of rape against him. You know, are we... or Woody Allen, for example, the unsavory relationship with his stepdaughter. You know, if Michael Jackson, for example, can we... is it okay to listen to a piece of music by somebody who is a bad person? And this book doesn't give answers, so I really loved that, and it's a personal reflection as well. It really takes you on this thought experiment, and it kind of leaves it up to you to decide how you think.
Mignon: That's fascinating. Does it talk at all about AI? Because I feel like there's also been a conversation going on about when there is no person behind a piece of writing or... you know, that book sounds like it's about the relationship between the person and the work, but there's also now this new problem where there is no person behind the work, and does that affect how we view the work? Does it go into that at all?
Florence: I think it's too young for that. It's quite recent, but I think it's like 2022, which was maybe just when AI came into all our lives. So it doesn't talk about that, doesn't think about that. But yeah, I think that would be supportive of the conversation that one could have, and that would give some interesting background probably as well and ways to think about the AI challenge.
Mignon: Fascinating. Okay, and what's your third book?
Florence: Oh, my last one. I left it last because I love it so much. That's a novel, "Offshore" by Penelope Fitzgerald. She's a British... or she was a British author who started or who was successful a bit later in life, so she was a late bloomer, and she received several prizes for her novels. And this book is very short. I read it every time I go to London. It's about a woman and her two daughters living on the Thames in the 1960s. And Penelope Fitzgerald has an experience of living in this barge in Chelsea in London. And the writing is very dense, very lyrical, and the characters are all in this explored... They're very likable, but nobody is a hero here. Just very much like in real life. And the tone of Penelope Fitzgerald is always a little bit melancholic and at the same time really a zest for life, I think.
Mignon: Wonderful. Those are great recommendations. Thank you so much. And your book again is "On the Mark." You are Florence Hazrat. Thank you so much for being here today.
Florence: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.
Mignon: Oh, and tell people where they can find you.
Florence: I am on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and I'm called The Punctuation Lady.
Mignon: Wonderful. Well, thank you, Punctuation Lady.