8 years ago
8
Punctuation that failed to make its mark
Several writers and inventors in the last century tried to introduce new marks of punctuation into the English language – but they all failed.
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None of those are that good.
Not even the interrobang‽ C’mon, like you’ve never wanted a sarcasm mark~
That one made enough of a mark to be part of Unicode, so it shouldn't be in the article.
I really like the question comma and the exclamation comma. Are those in unicode?, apparently not.
It’s perfectly acceptable to use the question and exclamation marks as if they were commas, within sentences. No need for new glyphs for that. As in “Lo! and behold.”
Hmmm. I have always thought that a question mark or an exclamation mark ended a sentence. A brief perusal of Fowler's doesn't really help. A comma question and exclamation would certainly allow phrases in a sentence to be easily marked.
This is much easier to grasp in Spanish, where the part that is exclamative or interrogative is clearly delimited by both starting and ending punctuation (¡ exclamation ! ¿ interrogation ?).
I think the reason that most of these didn't really catch on, is due to creative writing picking up the slack for what punctuation lacked.
It's not a decision between, "she said,'Who didn't put gas in the car?' or 'Who didn't put gas in the car!'" - it's just "'Who didn't put gas in the car?" she questioned angrily." Bazin’s marks are made redundant by the tone of the piece, where irony and certainty really don't need to be explicitly pointed out. The question and exclamation commas don't really serve a purpose, because the tone of each clause could really be determined through context clues. The only thing that's not always explicit or easily identifiable is sarcasm, but there's usually an ounce of hyperbole or a previous or later contrast of opinion that make it more apparent.
They're all neat ideas, but I think some feel that they're just cop outs for lazy reading / writing. Plus, they don't really add enough benefit for people to start using them.