If you could create a punctuation mark, what would its function be and what would it look like?
That's from Hudson Collins, loyal MR reader. I've always liked the chess marks "!?" and "?!" and wondered why they weren't used in standard English. The former refers to a startling move which is uncertain in merit and the latter refers to a dubious move which creates difficult to handle complications. Plus "N" could be used to mark sentences with novel ideas. I also would ask for a punctuation mark meaning: "This sentence adds an "N+1" understanding to a problem which everyone else is discussing at an "N" level." Maybe the mark could be an arrow pointing up to the sky. Similarly, you could imagine an arrow pointing downwards to hell.
What kind of punctuation mark would you add?
I’ve been using those marks on the internet ever since I read them in Frank Portman’s King Dork.
I don’t really think those punctuation marks would work–the author isn’t the one who should be saying how novel or startling his revelations are, except possibly as a third-person narrator.
Perhaps punctuation marks indicating the author’s levels of certainty/doubt would be useful.
I would change our punctuation to be similar to spanish where the ? and ! both preceeds and follows a question. For long sentences, it helps to know which you’re dealing with before starting.
Although not new, I think the ellipsis (…) is very underused. It’s a fabulous way to allow the readers to…
something to denote sarcasm
I would add an “I am not sure insert what you think is appropriate”
mark
“Although not new, I think the ellipsis (…) is very underused. It’s a fabulous way to allow the readers to…”
Don’t give my mother ideas… she uses them like periods… it looks like she’s always trailing off… and she often forgets how many dots there are..
Tyler,
Perhaps you should start using these concepts in your blog posts. Then attribution will come to you when they become generally accepted by the mainstream.
“I also would ask for a punctuation mark meaning: “This sentence adds an “N+1″ understanding to a problem which everyone else is discussing at an “N” level”
Poker players would like this. “Level” is in fact a popular term for deadpan humour on the 2+2 poker forums, in which a person who takes it seriously is “leveled” because the original poster was thinking “on a higher level”.
It’s not a new creation but I would say the irony mark sorely needs to be adopted. Think of the utility for email/chat alone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_mark
I love MR. However, I wish you would give your posts (such as this) titles that relate to the content, rather than using them as category tags. “Questions that are rarely asked” is very useful as a category, but poor as a title for the blog post.
I don’t expect you to do this for the benefit of my preferred aethetic – so I will appeal to Tyler-ness: think of the extra data you could create by appropriately tagging your themes! Maybe you’d like to know that in 2009 you averaged 1.2 Markets in Everything per week, but only 0.8 Questions that are rarely asked. Also, consider that when we share your titles via Twitter, RSS, etc, we need descriptive phrases to stimulate people to read your musings. There is a social benefit to this, as it will probably increase their intelligence, as reading MR has increased mine.
Couldn’t agree more Eli. Checkout “The Sarcmark”, a punctuation mark designed to denote sarcasm. http://02d9656.netsoljsp.com/SarcMark/modules/user/commonfiles/loadhome.do
The incredulous sigh: …?!?…
I guess it’s not really standard yet, but I see the !? “incredulity mark” fairly often.
I’d add a sign for a ‘semantic pause’– like the two dashes in this sentence, but standardized. Also signs to distinguish between quotation marks that mean “somebody said”, and quotation marks that are “air quotes”– again, like the quotes in this sentence, but standardized.
I’ve missed levels of parenthesis for nested stuff. Same with quotation marks. Sometimes life would be simpler if I could parenthesize a already parenthesized comment without having the reader figure out which one had ended.
e.g. using (blah blah {more blah [still more blah]})
“He said ‘no’ and she said ‘yes’”
I recommend Lynne Truss’ “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves” on the history and use of punctuation; and also Victor Borge’s “Phonetic Punctuation” skit.
I would also note that many of the suggestions above are for Internet-type messages. I just realized this is because that communication occupies a middle position between face-to-face speech and narrative (as in a novel).
In speech, we of course have intonation, cadence, and other means to signal emotional and other content, beyond the simple stream of words. In narrative, we have two separate streams, the quotations of the spoken words and the non-quoted material which is used to describe emotional content, as well as things that aren’t conveyed in speech such as inner narrative and motivations.
Net conversations present only the speech-like sequence of words, without the narrative’s side streams. This is not new, of course, as it has been the convention for letters and journals for many centuries. What does seem to differ is that net conversations want a compact way of signaling the side streams, instead of using the letter convention of writing them out. Thus, where a young lady of the early 1900s might have written,
“My dearest cousin, I was at first confused by his words, but when their full import became clear I of course was simply livid with anger at the suggestion, but must admit in strictest confidence of course that I was also intrigued.”
our modern writers would apparently prefer something on the lines of,
“He ?asked `+’ me on a $#* date!&!!”
First, I’d like to see more people take advantage of the punctuation currently part of standard English. Aside from that, sometimes I wish there were something like mathematical parentheses in English prose. English uses parentheses for parenthetical remarks (imagine that!) but math uses them for disambiguation.
Some more from the USENET community: [snip] (remove non essential matter from a quote) foo, bar (generic place holders) that make arguments easier.
I agree with Rahul that there is lots of room for improvement in the use of parenthesis. They are useful for clarifications, asides, examples, etc. Apart from the nesting structure, it would be great to have different parenthesis symbols to denote, say, an example, a related thought, etc.
I think Tyler is confusing annotation with punctuation. In chess, certain symbols are used to add commentary to games. As he points out, “?!” and “!?” are used along with others including “?” and “??”. The question marks note a blunder (for one ?) or a serious blunder (“??”). These doen’t imply questions. They are used to save space. The move itself is note posing a question (e.g. 1. e4?).
Every fiber of my being resists introducing new punctuation. It seems that the millenials are trying to strip every vowel and most consonants out of the English as it is. Unless there is need to save space, then we should use words to communcate how we are feeling about a subject, not symbols. I don’t want to have to use a decoder ring next time I read my favorite novel.
In an argument should bystanders get to use the chess position evaluator symbols?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuation_(chess)#Position_evaluation_symbols
so the usefullnes of implementing this argument would be ∞: Unclear
If someone came up with a good reason to use these symbols they could end their argument with =/+: Slight advantage etc
underneatht hat section in wikipedia there are symbols of space, position, initiative,⇄: Counterplay etc. surely these would be useful in political arguments?
I would like a punctuation mark that identifies the author of a sentence as an Obamacrat or a Rethuglican (maybe a small donkey and elephant) so I know which way to avoid critical thinking.
I would replace the exclamation mark with thumbs ups
okapis are tres mignon
finds funny that someone has proposed a punctuation mark to denote irony, which, by definition, would make an ironic statement non-ironic (along the lines of the liar’s paradox). similarly, the point of sarcasm is to mock those who don’t get that you are joking, so a sarcasm mark would take a statement out of the realm of true sarcasm.
Symbiosis is *indelible*.
There really should be a punctuation mark encapsulating the understated truth that symbiosis is indelible. I’ve tried emoticons, but find they don’t encapsulate the full range of human emotion.
I’d like to cast a vote in favor of the “enthuse mark,” which may be dubiously named but solves the opposite problem of the sarcasm mark. That is, for the difficulty in discerning sincerity in many reaches of the Internet (not to mention personal correspondence). Someone made a website for it: http://enthusemark.info/
A punctuation mark for sarcasm could be useful, I suppose
to Filipok:
WTF exists. It looks like this: !?!
“Plus ‘N’ could be used to mark sentences with novel ideas.”
That’s not punctuation. It’s an abbreviation. And it would be counterproductive in sentences that were already using a capital N to refer to something.
“I guess it’s not really standard yet, but I see the !? ‘incredulity mark’ fairly often.”
Exclamation marks and question marks mixed together have been used for probably a century. The only new thing is the label, “incredulity mark.”
The one I’d like to see is a combination of a semicolon and an exclamation mark — an exclamation mark with a comma at the bottom instead of a period. This is for compound sentences with a semicolon but you want to emphasize the first half.
Same with a question mark and a semicolon.
@Alan: Sure, it doesn’t “have” to be “fewer” in the first sentence, but it really really should be. Given both the context and your need for a defense, you shouldn’t have written it like that.
i would want a sarcasm Punctuation mark it would be like a 3 with an extra hump
second the sarcasm – so many misperceptions occur w/o.
- An awkward pause. Something longer than a period and less idea-breaking than a paragraph break.
- Something to imply a sarcastic tone of voice.
If the text of the hyperlink is a question, the question is included in the text of the hyperlink. If a question mark comes at the end, but is not included in the text of the hyperlink it signals some kind of doubt about the content of the linked page. so any such punctuation mark will be overused and uninformative.
I second Sam Lyon. I really miss that.
Eli beat me to it: sarcasm indicators.
~~You’re welcome~~
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