Punctuation captures the pauses and inflection of speech. Will we continue to use it in a digital age? Yes, Florence Hazrat argues, in a brief history of punctuation at Aeon:

The development of punctuation is messy and diffuse: individual writers’ habits, different shapes of marks that keep mutating from manuscript to manuscript, or simply pragmatic reasons of space all complicate a simple narrative. Rather than a neat evolutionary line, imagine punctuation developing as a rhizome, a horizontal mesh of practices, explorations and loosely understood conventions whose overlapping branches sometimes do the same thing but look different. Sometimes they disappear and return at later points elsewhere, or burst to the surface from obscurity and come to dominate the organism for various reasons.

By the late Middle Ages, the comma, the colon and the full stop had established themselves. The exclamation and the question mark joined their ranks, attesting to a need for emotional emphasis and clarification of intonation. What is perfectly clear in speech can become doubtful in its written form, in spite of question words and interrogative grammatical constructions.

The hope or necessity to clarify the meaning of words that came disembodied of vocal inflections or body language drove the advent of punctuation. A rare instance of known invention is the birth of brackets in De nobilitate legum et medicine (1399), a work on the competition for nobility between medicine and law: the Italian scholar Coluccio Salutati added half-angular, half-pointy brackets to the text written by his amanuensis, showing the care he took over the minutiae of written expression.

The parenthesis is the rhetorical figure of digression. It existed before the invention of the visual sign to mark it off from the main story. The Roman rhetorician Quintilian latinises a digression as interpositio in his book on rhetorical training, which, just as the Greek counterpart parenthesis does, draws attention to the physical image of something spatially standing between or beside something else. A syntactic mini-digression is thus ancient but it took some 1,500 years to crystallise those relationships between main clauses and adjunct through the semi-permeable walls of brackets. As writing needed to do more work in trade and political communication, more and more signs of punctuation were invented to facilitate faster and more accurate reading.

Speaking of punctuation, if you use periods in your texts, you’re the worst, according to Gen Z: “While older texters may consider the period an innocent symbol that a sentence has ended, digital natives consider it a triggering form of aggression.”

In other news: C. S. Lewis dedicated The Horse and His Boy to his two stepsons—David and Douglas Gresham. David was schizophrenic and died in a Swiss mental hospital several years ago. Douglas talks to First Things about Lewis’s later years caring for David: “For decades, despite a booming cottage industry of Lewis biographies and endless academic theorizing about the last years of Lewis’s life, Douglas kept to himself the fact that Lewis struggled mightily to help his mentally ill stepson. ‘We didn’t tell anybody,’ he told me . . . Douglas recounted some surreal stories. ‘I learned how to fight very fast; I learned how to run very fast,’ he recalled. ‘I came out of the kitchen [at The Kilns] one afternoon, for example. . . As I walked out the brick arch doorway, there was a splash, and I was covered in gasoline. My brother was standing there trying to strike a match to throw at me. I kicked his wrist so hard I nearly broke it. The matches went flying, and I took off.’ Douglas told me that this sort of thing was not uncommon. ‘It was a difficult childhood for me,’ he said. ‘Jack tried his very hardest for David all the time. He tried to help in every way he could—he was kind and gentle and wonderful with him.’”

How and why did Morton Sobell become a spy for the Soviet Union? David Evanier tells the story: “On 11 March 2008, Morton Sobell, who was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, finally admitted to the New York Times, after five decades of denial, that he had spied for the Soviet Union. He implicated Julius Rosenberg in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets ‘classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb’. He was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison and served almost 19. The reporter, Sam Roberts, asked Sobell if, in fact, he was a spy. Sobell replied nonchalantly, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that. I never thought of it as that in those terms.’ This was the same insouciant Morty I remembered from the mid-1980s when I first met him.”

Cancel culture has “built-in limitations,” Tyler Cowen argues, and will prove weaker in the long run than most people think: “Fortunately, while ‘cancel culture’ and political correctness have become stronger and more influential over the last few years, these movements have built-in limitations. They will prove to be a durable element of American culture, but by no means a dominant one. How do I know? I don’t, of course, but consider which recent developments have most captivated young people and grabbed their attention. The first is the gaming ecosystem Fortnite, with about 350 million global users. The second is the short video platform TikTok, which now has 80 million active users in the U.S. alone. Both are huge worlds unto themselves, and both resist easy generalization. But it is safe to say that but they are not bastions of political correctness.” I’m not so sure, but let’s hope he’s right.

Lucien Freud was a terrible person, but was he a great painter? William Feaver’s new biography makes the affirmative case: “In 1995 the art critic David Sylvester caused a stir by suggesting in the Guardian that Lucian Freud – by then 73 and widely acknowledged as a major figurative British artist – was ‘not a real painter’. Freud, Sylvester wrote, lacked natural talent but had achieved his success through ‘a huge effort of will applied to the realisation of a highly personal and searching vision of the world’ . . . Feaver isn’t about to put Freud on the couch. Where he really excels is as a critic, nudging us away from Sylvester’s view of Freud as an idiot savant, a wode-covered savage strange to all artifice, to position him squarely in a sophisticated European painterly tradition. At their very best, the pictures Freud produced in the last half of his life bring to mind Dryden’s idea of fancy ‘moving the Sleeping Images of Things towards the Light’.”

Students game Edgenuity’s grading algorithm: “More than 20,000 schools currently use the platform, according to the company’s website, including 20 of the country’s 25 largest school districts, and two students from different high schools to Lazare told me they found a similar way to cheat. They often copy the text of their questions and paste it into the answer field, assuming it’s likely to contain the relevant keywords. One told me they used the trick all throughout last semester and received full credit ‘pretty much every time.’ Another high school student, who used Edgenuity a few years ago, said he would sometimes try submitting batches of words related to the questions ‘only when I was completely clueless.’ The method worked ‘more often than not.’” 

Photos: Sveti Stefan  

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