7 Weird Old Punctuation Marks We Should Bring Back

We’re living in a time where we have more technology than ever for sharing our words, but we still constantly get misunderstood. One cause of this is that we simply don’t use enough punctuation in our text. People could stick exclamation marks at the end of every funny sentence, but they don’t, perhaps for fear of looking like they’re laughing at their own joke. In messages, some people think even ending a sentence with a period makes it look too formal or too cold.

Maybe we should fight this by using as much punctuation as possible. In fact, you can go even further and bring back some archaic punctuation marks that haven’t been used in decades. People had various reasons for dropping these old punctuation marks, but it would be fun to pick them back up again.

1. VINCULUM
2. THE DOG’S BOLLOCKS 
3. DIPLE OBELISMENE
4. DIAERESIS
5. PERCONTATION MARK
6. MANICULE
7. FLEURON

VINCULUM

You know, of course, about underlining. It means sticking a line under a word for emphasis, and the concept is so famous that “underlining” became a word that refers to emphasizing stuff even when we aren’t talking about literal lines. Thanks to word processors, people learned that underlining is one of the three primary things you can do to text, along with making it bold or adding italics. 

But there has also existed a concept called overlining. You draw the line on top of the text (a line like this: ‾ ) instead of at the bottom. Underlining has fallen out of fashion in most writing, partly because people associate the concept so much with web links, so maybe it’s time for overlining to make a comeback. 

The horizontal line used in overlining is called a vinculum, and it also has some specific uses that underlines don’t cover. When you write out a decimal that repeats forever (like how one-third is equal to 0.333...), you can draw a vinculum over the specific sequence that repeats. 

THE DOG’S BOLLOCKS 

When your sentence says, “I’m about to say something,” and then you say that thing, we have a way of separating the two halves of the sentence: a colon. We also have an alternative way of separating the two—a dash. In previous times, people would sometimes combine the two :— they’d use a colon and a dash together. 

This combo made it clear that the second part of the sentence was the final part that the first part announced—rather than just a parenthetical phrase, which often follows a dash, as it does right here—while also urging the reader to pause, which is something colons don’t always do.

The combination of a colon and a dash was referred to as the dog’s bollock’s. This is because it resembles genitalia. That may be one reason it fell out of favor, but if eggplant emojis are any indication, it’s also a reason we need to bring it back.

DIPLE OBELISMENE

This interesting mark consists of a trio of dots, arranged like this: ⸫

If you happen to be a fan of formal logic, you might recognize that as a symbol used for marking conclusions that you derive mathematically in syllogisms. Otherwise, the diple obelismene popped up in text in the margins beside paragraphs. This drew readers’ eyes to the most important parts to read. Considering the high demand for tl;drs after long text, the need for such a symbol should be obvious. 

DIAERESIS

If you go through old books, you’ll sometimes see two dots on top of a vowel, such as over the second “o” in “coöperation.” The dots may look like an umlaut, the dots you see on top of some letters in languages like German, but they are really a different mark called a diaeresis and serve a different function.

A diaeresis only ever appears on the second of two consecutive vowels in a word. It lets you know the two vowels make two separate sounds in two separate syllables, rather than combining to make a single one. Cooperation, for example, is not pronounced “coop-eration.” It is pronounced “co-operation.” For this reason, you’ll also sometimes see old books spell “cooperation” with a hyphen between the two o’s. A pair of vowel sounds, the sort marked by a diaeresis, is known as a vowel hiatus. 

In modern English, you probably only ever see the diaeresis in one single word: naïve. However, one publication, The New Yorker, continues to use it, in defiance of all trends. In 1978, the magazine’s style editor of 50 years, Hobie Weekes, was set to finally adapt and strike the diaeresis from The New Yorker’s style guide. But then he died, and they’ve since chosen to let it be, as though in his honor. 

PERCONTATION MARK

The most common misunderstanding in written language today is someone taking you seriously when you were really joking. For a little while, forums tried a standard whereby people wrote in italics when they were being sarcastic, but this didn’t catch on. A special font that displayed text in reverse italics to show sarcasm was even less easy to adopt. 

People online switched to ending sarcastic text with “[/sarcasm]” or “.” This lives on in an abbreviated form as “/s,” even by people with no familiarity with forum markup or HTML tags.

In the 16th century, printers tried a new symbol called the perconation mark. It looked like a reverse question mark (؟), and it primarily served to mark questions as rhetorical, letting it be known that the author was not looking for an answer. Later, the French used this mark and called it a point d'ironie, to mark irony. 

The perconation mark is as necessary now as ever, so it likely wouldn’t have fallen out of usage—if it ever caught on in the first place, which it sadly never did. 

MANICULE

Manuscripts from the Renaissance would sometimes have a symbol called a manicule in the margins to highlight specific sections. The word “manicule,” much like the word “manuscript” itself, derives from the Latin word for hand.

The manicule was an actual drawing of a hand that pointed at the desired text. It served a similar function to the diple obelismene, but you didn’t need to know anything about the symbol beforehand to understand its function. Everyone knows to look where a finger points. 

The manicule fell out of use thanks to the invention of the printing press. A press would have individual pieces of type for each letter and for several other symbols, but it couldn’t have one for everything, and doodles of hands did not make the cut. 

However, we now live in the age of limitless emojis, so you’re free to once again stick-pointing fingers in front of any line you consider extra special. In fact, you don’t even need an emoji for this, since we’re also able to represent the manicule with plain text: ☞

FLEURON

When a bunch of words run together, we take a pause, and we represent the end of the first sentence with a period. When a bunch of sentences run together, we take a pause, and we represent the end of the first paragraph with a line break. 

When a bunch of paragraphs run together, we don’t have a standard way of separating them. Some websites will insert images to break up collections of paragraphs. Sometimes, ads will appear and do the trick. With many types of writing, it’s convenient to divide the text into short sections and give each one its own subheading. 

Written text offered another alternative, the fleuron. It looks like a flower: ❦ and can separate groups of paragraphs, and it also serves to mark the end of the text. Granted, this last function is not very important, because you don’t need to be told the text is done when no text remains. But it gives the reader a nice sense of closure.

A text might not necessarily have any sort of strong conclusion, but then the reader sees a centered fleuron right after it and feels a sensation of release. 

You May Also Like: