- Imagine you're about to give an important speech.

You step up to the podium, clear your throat, take a look at the teleprompter and see... THIS?

Not only are there no spaces between words, but the text is written in the boustrophedon style, ancient Greek for "as the ox turns" where the direction alternates between left to right and right to left with every line.

You might be able to stumble your way through, but you certainly won't win any awards for public speaking.

Now, when we are lamenting the dead at, uh, tribute should be paid to uh... (crickets chirping) Believe it or not, this is how ancient Greeks wrote their texts, which is why if an orator was going to recite a speech, they would likely rehearse it several times in advance, perhaps making little marks to remind them when to pause or take a breath.

Those little marks could arguably be said to be the first ancestors of our modern day punctuation.

But it would take a lot of historical events and innovations to get from this to this.

I'm Dr.

Erica Brozovsky and this is "Otherwords."

(playful music) - "Otherwords."

- Around 200 BC, the head librarian of the Great Library of Alexandria, Aristophanes of Byzantium, tried to come up with standardized markings for denoting when a speaker should pause while reading a text, known as distinctiones.

A mid-level dot indicated a short pause, a low dot meant a medium pause, and a high dot meant a long pause.

These were eventually called the komma, kolon, and periodos.

These names may sound familiar, but according to author Keith Houston, who spent years researching the history of punctuation, distinctiones failed to catch on at the time.

That's because public speaking was considered a serious art form for both the ancient Greeks and the Romans that followed.

Letting the text dictate when you should pause or take a breath was offensive to some like asking ChatGPT to write your poetry.

The famous orator Cicero said that the end of a sentence "ought to be determined not by a stroke interposed by a copyist, but by the constraint of the rhythm."

First several hundred years, punctuation remained an inconsistent affair rather than a standardized writing practice.

But then in the 4th century, the Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity.

And Christians, if you haven't noticed, are real sticklers about the written word.

Unlike oral pagan religions, misinterpreting Christian texts could mean the difference between heaven and hell.

So over the next few centuries, Christian writers resurrected Aristophanes's dots, ha ha, along with some other note taking marks from the Library of Alexandria, and even threw in some musical notations to try to make the writing as unambiguous as possible.

These new marks were less about pauses and breath and more about meaning.

A punctus interrogativus at the end of a sentence indicated a question, with the little squiggle above the point perhaps suggesting that the speaker's voice should go up, as in quo vadis?

A diple next to a line meant there was a direct quote from the Bible in there, which eventually morphed into our modern quotation marks and the guillemets used in other countries like France and Italy, and an asteriskos, or little star, was used to draw attention to an interesting passage.

Another symbol the Christians popularized began as a K written in the margin to denote a new topic or idea.

The K stood for kaput as in the head of a new section.

Over hundreds of years, the K became a C for capitulum, or little head, and was ad dorm with crossbar and filled with color.

When copying texts, monk scribes would leave space for an artist to later add a decorative capitulum.

But if time ran out, those spaces would go empty, giving rise to the modern practice of indenting the beginnings of paragraphs.

The pilcrow, as it's known today, is still used in legal documents to refer to paragraphs, and in word processors as a hidden formatting character.

By the 8th century, in an effort to make Latin texts more legible, Irish monks started to finally put spaces between words.

And shortly thereafter, the Emperor Charlemagne, who understood the importance of writing, even though he himself was mostly illiterate, promoted the adoption of a unified, easier to read script called the Carolingian minuscule, what we know today as lowercase letters.

The new minuscule featured several ligatures, or conjoined letters, one of which was et Latin for and.

Over the years, this ligature morphed into what we now recognize as the and sign.

But its formal name, ampersand has a very informal origin.

During the 19th century, school children were taught the and sign as the 27th letter of the alphabet, and they would recite it as X, Y, Z, and per se and.

With per se being Latin for by itself.

Eventually and per se and got scrunched together to ampersand.

If you were a medieval scribe tasked with copying hundreds of pages of text, you'd always be looking for ways to save time and space.

One theory claims that the exclamation point came from the stacking of the letters IO, the Latin word for joy.

There's not a lot of evidence for this, but this kind of superscript abbreviation is where the Spanish ene comes from.

Originally, two ends on top of one another.

Omitting letters to save space, known as elision, was also common around 1500.

And the missing letters were sometimes commemorated with a mark that is the ancestor of today's apostrophe.

Writers of the time were pretty liberal with it, though today were limited to a discrete set of contractions.

The use of the apostrophe in possessives is probably due to the fact that in old English, many possessive nouns were formed by adding ES as in the kinges throne.

The apostrophe stands for the missing E. Another space saving abbreviation, particularly popular in records of trade was lb, which stood for libra, the Latin word for pound.

To indicate that it was an abbreviation, a horizontal bar was often added across the top.

If you were a clerk logging shipping records all day and had to scribble this over and over, you can see how it would start to look like our modern day hashtag.

That's right.

Long before it was preceding trending topics on Twitter, this was known as the pound sign.

This is similar to the probable origin of the at sign, an abbreviated A with a hastily drawn bar on top, something that the A stood for the Latin ad or the Greek ana.

But a more recent theory suggests it actually refers to amphora, an ancient pottery jar used to transport valuable goods, exactly the kind of word that a merchant would need to write hundreds of times.

In the 15th century, the printing crest spread across Europe, which took this wild menagerie of squiggles, dots, and lines, and more or less standardized them into the finite number of symbols we know today cast irrevocably in lead.

Later innovations like the typewriter narrowed the variety even further.

With only so many keys, designers had to be picky about what made the cut.

Even the exclamation point was left off of early models, assuming that users could type a period, then backspace, and add an apostrophe to make a close approximation.

But the age of computers has dramatically widened the scope of available punctuation and other typographical symbols.

Most digital fonts contain more punctuation than you probably recognize, like the interrobang, a combination of the exclamation point and question mark that was invented by an ad executive in the 1960s.

Or the Tironian et, a precursor to the ampersand that you can still see an old signage written in Irish Gaelic.

Ironically, while we have more punctuation at our fingertips than ever before, many people, especially younger people, are using it less than ever.

Within texting and social media, extensive punctuation use can come across as superfluous or even weirdly formal.

Exclamation points and question marks are often used not to accentuate sentences, but as standalone expressions of confusion or surprise.

Even the ancient habit of scrunching words together has made a comeback, but only after a pound sign.

This is likely because modern written communication is often so brief that grammatical signposts are unnecessary, but maybe it also reflects an unwillingness to be tied down to any rigid interpretation or style.

Like the ancient Greeks, we want the words in our messages to be flexible enough for the reader's imagination to make them come alive, period.

If you are as interested in punctuation as I am, comma, you should check out Keith Houston's "Shady Characters," period.

It's full of weird and fascinating symbol origins that will make you go, quote, "That really happened, interrobang," unquote.