It’s Time to Start Using Emotive Punctuation Marks

We can communicate across devices, platforms, and mediums at practically the speed of light. Shouldn’t our punctuation marks—not just emoji—evolve to express the nuanced emotions we feel?

In our age of irony, outrage, and trolling, it’s not so surprising that emoji have caught on as kind of a super-set of punctuation. Why wouldn’t they? We’re living in a particularly diverse and ambiguous time of communication, carrying on conversations internationally across devices, platforms, and mediums at practically the speed of light, and the Unicode Consortium’s constantly expanding library of cartoon symbols affords us new ways to express ourselves.

Of course, every human ever born has thought they live in a unique moment in history, which inevitably turns out to be as true a supposition as it is false. Sure, people are communicating with one another in more ways than ever. But authors have been butting up against the limitations of the written word since pre-punctuation ancient Greece, when Aristophanes proposed a series of dots to separate a manuscript’s long ribbon of words into sentences and paragraphs. And as for emoji themselves, they’re as ancient as the printing press itself.

What our digital age has given us, then, is not really a new need for the shades of meaning that emoji provide as much as an easy technical way of applying them. But it’s worth remembering that before emoji, countless characters tried — and failed — to take their place among the indispensable trinity of period, question mark, and exclamation point. In our time of multilayered meaning and easy digital typography, maybe some of these punctuation marks should make a comeback.

Take the most easily recognized of the bunch, the interrobang. A question mark overlaid with an exclamation point, it is designed to express incredulity and is consequently the perfect mark to express oneself at a moment in time when the arctic is literally in flames. (“The area around the North Pole is doing what‽”) It was proposed in 1962 in an issue of TYPETalk by advertising executive Martin K. Speckter as a solution to the eternal question (which itself could have an interrobang at the end): “How do you make sure dummies know a question is rhetorical?” This is not, however, how the interrobang is most commonly used — more often as a way of expressing both shock and puzzlement at once. Either way, by 1965, the interrobang was included in a typeface for the first time (Richard Isbell’s American typeface for American Type Frontiers), and by 1968, had made its way onto some Remington typewriters. Today, it is perhaps the best supported of the alternate punctuation marks, having a place in the character sets of Arial, Calibri, Lucida Grande, Courier, Times New Roman, and other stock system fonts.

If it seems strange that an ad exec was going around suggesting new punctuation marks, though, it wasn’t. Corresponding, perhaps not uncoincidentally, with the sudden advent of “cold type” phototypesetting, whereby fonts could be printed easily from a piece of glass or plastic without being pressed into hot metal, the midcentury saw a sudden explosion in the number of proposed new punctuation marks. During a postwar period when literally everything was being questioned, it felt like everyone and their mother was suddenly experimenting with punctuation… and no one more than French writer Hervé Bazin.

In his 1966 essay, Plumons l’Oiseau (“Let’s Pluck the Bird”), arguing for a phonemic orthography for the French language (in other words, a new system for writing in which the spelling of each word would map perfectly to its pronunciation, Bazin suggested no less than six new punctuation marks:

• The acclamation symbol: a slanted exclamation point with two heads like a hydra. Bazin described it as “the stylistic representation of those two little flags that float above the tour bus when the president comes to town.” Used for extreme excitement, when just one exclamation point won’t do.

• The authority mark: an exclamation point casting some shade from beneath a furrowed brow. This is meant to be used in circumstances in which advice is rhetorical and should most definitely be followed.

• The love point: A double-headed question mark shaped like a heart, it’s meant to indicate affection. “I love you!’ would be an obvious example, but you could also use it to soften a sentence with fondness that otherwise might be ambiguous:

• The certitude point: An exclamation point with a line over it, Bazin intended this punctuation mark to indicate complete conviction, e.g., “Climate change is real!” Think of it as the punctuation equivalent to underlining a sentence.

• The doubt point: The extreme opposite of the certitude point, this zig-zagged question mark is meant to end a sentence when a period might appear too prescriptive. e.g., “Trump urges unity versus racism.”

The most famous of Hazin’s proposed punctuation marks, though, is the irony mark. An exclamation point with a wry grin superimposed, the irony mark was conceived as the punctuation equivalent of the winky face emoji. Bazin, however, is not the only person who has suggested ironical punctuation. In fact, the call for sarcastic punctuation is almost as old as typography itself, with English printer Henry Denham inventing the first irony mark back in the 1580s. And in our own ironic age, it is perhaps no surprise that this school of alternate punctuation is still thriving, with both the trademarked SarcMark (a spiral around a period) and the SnarkMark (a period with a little tilde trailing from it) proposed in the last decade as typographic ways of indicating snark and sarcasm.

With emoji such a major part of our lives, it’s tempting to look at these failed typographic experiments as now superfluous, and to a certain extent, that’s true. A punctuation mark is never going to be as universally accessible as an emoji saying the same thing, simply because the language of cartoon faces conveys meaning without needing to be previously explained. If you’ve never seen it before, a SnarkMark is potentially a weird printing error, while an eye-roll emoji is something that every person in every language can immediately understand.

But I think there’s a place for these marks, and new ones like it. Because while new emoji will always be more universally understandable than new punctuation marks, punctuation will always be more universally appropriate. It’s weird to use an emoji in a short story, a newspaper article, a letter to your bank, a statement from a politician, etc., where the likes of an interrobang or acclamation point could make sense. And while there are technical challenges to the wide-scale adoption of alternative punctuation marks (for example, there needs to be a way for them to be displayed across devices when they aren’t supported by a user’s typeface, which of course they won’t be), the success of the Unicode Consortium in maintaining and promoting an ever-expanding library of emoji shows these challenges aren’t insurmountable.

Maybe someday, the consortium will promote and manage a library of oddball punctuation marks in the same way they handle Emoji. And maybe one day we will switch between emojis and emotive punctuation in the same way we switch fonts according to what mood we want to strike. In a new millennium in which human communication is more meta, variegated, and nuanced than ever before, there’s a place for as many different punctuation points as there are shades of human emotion. And if I could, I’d insert a certitude point here.

Magenta is a publication of Huge.