Mark My Words

The conventions of orthography evolve as language itself changes. Some developments are accidental while others are more directed, but there’s no telling which will last. There have been novelties in punctuation, for example, that have never been fully adopted (like the “irony point” and the “question comma”). And the jury is still out on emojis and the interrobang (a combination of question and exclamation marks).

Other changes involve a paring down. Despite the best efforts of Ben Franklin, English lost the capitalization of common nouns in the eighteenth century. And despite the efforts of a few grammarians who can still use it correctly, the semicolon may be on its last legs. In this same endangered category, we might one day find quotation marks, which are being silently dismissed by a number of contemporary writers. They aren’t just replacing quotation marks with dashes to introduce direct speech, which is itself a convention of long...