The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Punctuation
Dots and dashes, interrobangs and cat’s claws

When punctuation began, it was mainly to help people read out loud. Until a few hundred years ago, not many people were taught to read, so there was a lot more reading out loud by the few who could.

To help these out-loud readers in the ancient world, signs known as points were added to pages of writing. This is where the word punctuation comes from—the Latin word punctus,meaning “point.” These points told readers when to pause, when to take a breath, and what to emphasize. They were a bit like all those notation marks in music that show you when to bang the piano really loudly, or when to play very, very slowly.

In Europe from the early centuries AD, these sorts of points were quite widely used, although not everybody used the same points for the same thing (here we go again!). But by the reign of King Charlemagne of France in the late eighth century, there was at least some agreement in Europe about a few of the signs, as well as things like capital and lowercase letters, paragraphs, and spaces between words.

Then, when the printing press was invented in the fifteenth century, printers wanted some firmer guidelines about what to put where, so that everyone was doing the same thing. And now that more and more books were being printed, people started to think of punctuation as something that could help them make sense of what they were reading silently as well as out loud.

Since that time, all sorts of punctuation rules have been discovered, invented, and argued about, and many books have been written on the topic. You would have been taught some of the basic rules having to do with capital letters, periods, apostrophes, and commas at school. But even these rules have sometimes proved hard to pin down . . .