Florence Hazrat’s “On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World” (Basic Books) is a microhistory that traces the small markings that structure written language from Mesopotamian cuneiform to the emoji era. The WSJ assigned a conservative columnist to review it, and the tension is illuminating.

The timeline of punctuation innovation:

  • The period emerged ~2,000 years ago when Alexandrian librarian Aristophanes of Byzantium introduced dots to distinguish sentence beginnings, ends, and pauses
  • The question mark entered the repertoire over the 8th and 9th centuries
  • The exclamation point arrived in the mid-14th century — “a welcome infusion of emotion onto the page”
  • Parentheses and apostrophe joined in the 15th century
  • Nothing new has stuck since ~1600 — the interrobang (a 1960s ad man’s invention) never caught on

What makes the book interesting is that Hazrat doesn’t treat punctuation as politically neutral. She argues that the Folger Shakespeare Library’s added exclamation points in Cleopatra’s speeches “racialized as the exotic, seductive, and overly emotional other from the ‘magical’ East.” She critiques the hyphen in “Israel-Palestine conflict” for failing to “hold apart the colonizer and the colonized.” She describes the “war on terror” as “a lawless bombing campaign across several countries in the Middle East.” And she argues the Constitution’s Second Amendment comma should go.

The WSJ reviewer calls this “febrile political static” and “tiresome” — which is itself a useful data point about both the book and the review.

  • Punctuation originally guided oral performance, not silent reading — marks told a reader where to pause, breathe, inflect
  • The ampersand evolved from Roman graffiti over centuries
  • Goebbels “hijacked the punching power of the exclamation mark” in Nazi propaganda
  • Hazrat’s earlier book “An Admirable Point” (2022) covered the exclamation mark alone

A history of punctuation that treats its subject with the political seriousness written language deserves — and a WSJ review that inadvertently proves the book’s point about whose politics get labeled “neutral.”