The Word Snoop (6 page)

As time passed, luckily the church leaders changed their minds and decided it wasn’t such a bad idea to have the Bible in English. So people were allowed to translate it without getting executed, and quite a few English Bibles were published. A few too many, really, as some of them were not very good. People were getting confused with so many different versions around. Finally, in 1611, during the reign of King James I, it was decided to get all the translations together and pick the best bits to make one extra-special official Bible that could be put in every church in the country. Known as the King James Bible, this became the regular Bible used by English speakers for at least the next 300 years.

The King James Bible is largely based on the translation of William Tyndale, who transformed the ancient foreign languages into dignified, astonishing, mysterious English. Like Shakespeare, the King James Bible has been so loved, and read so many times over and over again, that thousands of its strange and beautiful phrases have become part of how we speak, think, and write. Here are just a few of the hundreds of expressions that have come to us in English via Hebrew and Greek from the King James Bible.

W
hen 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 . . .

Now you know
why
punctuation began—but how come we use those particular signs? And where did they get their names and shapes from? Well, after hours of careful snooping, here’s what I managed to find out . . .

All three of these types of punctuation were given their Greek names by a friendly librarian named Aristophanes, who lived in Byzantium in the second century BC. They were marks on the page, each with a message to the reader.

In the Middles Ages (from around the fifth to the sixteenth century), a squiggle above a period was sometimes used to show that the sentence was a question and that the person speaking should make their voice go up at the end. By the seventh century, it had turned into what we call a question mark. The curly shape may have come from drawing the letter Q—short for the Latin
Quaestio,
meaning “question.”

In the early days of punctuation, if you were reading out loud and you saw this sign above a period, you were supposed to make your voice sound amazed or surprised, much like we do today. Some people think the sign began as a squashed-up version of the ancient Greek word
IO
meaning “Oh gosh!” (or something like that), with the I on top and the O underneath. However it came about, it was well in use by the seventh century. At that time it was sometimes known as the “mark of admiration.” (!)

More punctuation marks are being born all the time—just think of all the little signs you use when you’re texting.

But have you ever seen this?

It’s an interrobang—a punctuation mark invented by Martin K. Speckter in 1962. It’s especially for those moments when you want to use a question mark and an exclamation mark all at once. It could certainly be pretty useful for comic book writers!?!?!?

And have you ever heard of a question-comma or an exclamation-comma?

If you open up one of the books about Selby, the fabulous talking dog, chances are you’ll spot one. These were featured in a book by the Australian author Duncan Ball, for those times when you want to use a question mark or an exclamation mark right in the middle of a sentence. Hey ! why not use one yourself? next time you’re writing a story.

Quotation marks are used to show that someone is speaking. The kind we have in English today began to be widely used during the eighteenth century. Before that, readers simply understood from the way a sentence was written that someone was speaking, although sometimes the spoken words were underlined.

In English, the apostrophe is used for two things—to show where a letter or letters are missing (such as
don’t,
for the missing
o
from “do n
o
t”); or to show who owns something (such as the
WordSnoop’s umbrella
).

The word
apostrophe
is Greek. In ancient Greek drama, an apostrophe was when an actor turned away from the audience to address someone who wasn’t there. (Perhaps they were at another play?) Anyway, the word came to be associated with the idea of standing in for something that was missing. So, for example, in Old English the letters
es
were used to show who owned something. Then the
e
started to be left out, and the apostrophe was put in to stand for that missing
e
.

Apostrophes are the punctuation mark that people seem to get most excited about—whether they love them or hate them. The Irish writer George Bernard Shaw didn’t like apostrophes at all, and proudly wrote one of his most successful plays,
Pygmalion
, using as few as possible. But Lewis Carroll, the author of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
simply adored apostrophes and put in as many as he possibly could. For example, instead of writing
can’t
(short for “ca
n
n
o
t”), he would write
ca’n’t
. It must have taken him quite a while to write things down sometimes—“Sorry, I sha’n’t come to play today. I ca’n’t quite finish this letter . . .”