15 September puts a very special someone of the punctuation family centre-stage. Someone whose tiny tiny size does not at all correspond to their enormous responsibility in all aspects of life from good relationship texting to juggling billions at the stock market.
The Dot.
(feeling kinda self-conscious to end on one now… or on many…)
Just take a moment to think about the dot’s heavy-lifting in our day-to-day: it’s a decimal separator in maths (1.5 hours are 90 minutes); it delimits website names such as this one (http.//); it flags up abbreviations although we constantly shed them (nobody writes U.S. or U.K.); and we end our sentences on this little speck of dust. The dot, or full stop, or period.
The smallest punctuation mark is also the most versatile and the most crucial one whose punching power decides when a sentence or an entire book is over. Done. Dead. There’s an awful finality around dots.
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They seem so self-contained, so ‘lovely’ as the philosopher Paul Robinson calls them, because they’re ‘simple’, ‘innocent of ambiguity’, exuding quiet ‘neutrality’. The Switzerland of punctuation, however, is anything but. In fact, the dot is just the start, and it’s the start of something bigger, more infinite, and much more wild than the philosopher wished for, or its inventor ever imagined.
No, the dot is not the end. It’s the beginning. That’s what author, illustrator, and bookshop owner Peter H. Reynolds thought when he produced The Dot, a book for young children (or old ones) on making your mark. Through a splash of colour in the form of a dot, a young girl realises that her misgivings about her artistic talents are unfounded, and she can, in fact, draw. Twenty years later, we’ve got an International Dot Day, and over 29 million people all over the world have played around with arty dots on 15 September.
A lonely dot is a bit of a sad thing, however, and so the potential for gregarious dots in packs has captured artists for centuries: fringe impressionists like Georges Seurat experimented with creating gradations without mixing colours in their pointillism paintings in the 1880s.
Japanese grande-dame of modern art Yayoi Kusama has made dots her life. Hallucinations of whizzing dots visited her as a child, and it’s those circles welling out on all sides into infinity that dominate her long career. In the 1960s, she staged happenings, drawing dots on naked people (and a horse!), intending to show the ‘self-obliteration’ of people thus bedotted, and returning them to the ‘infinite universe’ – safely caught in the ‘infinity nets’ as she named her webs of roundnesses. This is a bit cringe, but one could say Kusama is dotty about dots (which doesn’t actually have anything to do with the poor innocent circles, but comes from “doting” on someone, so being infatuated and acting silly).
Yayoi, though, is not the first person to become obsessed by the allure of infinite points: polka dots were all the rage with the cool cats of the 40s and 50s, and scream “Vintage!” a mile away today. The 1920s were the polka dot’s making with Minnie Mouse who conquered the world in storm in her iconic red dress with white dots (as opposed to the red dots on white jersey for the Tour de France Mountain stage winner).
Add to that the 1926 Miss America’s beach fashion choice, and you have an ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’ according to Brian Hyland’s 1960 song. And why the polka? That’s from a pattern associated with the polka folk dance from mid-nineteenth-century Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic.
The polka is a fun dance, and one must admit: it’s impossible to take yourself too seriously when you’re wearing the dots. That’s why it’s odd to say the least that Batman has a nemesis rocking the dot-style: Polka Dot Man lobbied against the Gotham City hero in 1962 by peeling a multi-coloured dot off his white suit which instantaneously enlarged into one weapon or other. Strangely, Polka Dot Man was not here to stay.
Other creatures, other coats: Dalmatians have to be the world’s funnest dogs, followed hot on the heels by Appaloosa horses, ladybugs, and loosely-spotted animals like leopards, giraffes, and deer.
Human dots make you stumble, animal dots camouflage. Dots are crucial for communication.
Technology has capitalised on the dot’s brief, spark-like entity: since the 1820s visually-impaired people can read and write through Louis Braille’s system of dot-reliefs embossed onto the page, and ten years later, people were sending messages via Morse code dots and dashes across unimaginable distances. In the 1870s, carrier pidgeons would wing secret photographic messages reduced to a miniature specks or microdots across battlefields, only to be re-translated into readable size, wonderfully imitated here.
But because this is a punctuation newsletter, I feel like there should be at least a whistle-stop tour through the invention of the grammatical dot, that is, the period or full stop.
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In the beginning there was nothing. No dots, no dashes, no question marks, and not even spaces between the words. PEOPLEINGREECEANDROMEWROTELIKETHISANDDIDJUSTFINETHANKYOUVERYMUCH. Well, some of them did fine, but nowhere near all. It’s not impossible but pretty cumbersome to read continual script without any traffic signs, and you had to be highly educated to do so.
In order to help inexperienced readers, Aristophanes of Byzantium, the head librarian of the famous ancient library of Alexandria, introduced a simple system of dots to flag up sentence structure: a dot at the top of the line would signal the end of a sentence (over the course of centuries, the dot wandered down the line where it settled into the relaxed comfort we know today). The high dot came with a middle and a low one for medium and short pauses, and if one thinks about it, a dot is really a genius idea: it’s so small that you can squeeze it anywhere, between any two letters. You can’t mistake it for a letter. And it’s not a complicated shape whose meaning you’d have to study laboriously. Simple and effective. What an elegant solution!
Aristophanes named the sign stigma teleia or terminal mark. The Romans called the three dots distinctions, referring to a properly phrased sentence, or the sentence part within two dots rather than the dots themselves. The dot was a punctus. A point.
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This terminology remained in use well into Shakespeare’s days with the added bonus of “prick” because when you scratch out a full stop with your quill or press it onto paper during the printing process, you pierce the surface, you make a tiny hole. Almost anyway. And yes, the naughty meaning was already around then.
A period, or periodus, still referred to the sentence as a whole. “Full stop” or “full point” referred to the mark itself. In Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Salario interrupts Solanio’s over-the-top delivery of some crucial news with a curt ‘Come, the full stop.’ Stop going on, and tell me what happened! Sometime in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, period started to refer to ⚫ but only in North America, and so it still is today. And nobody knows why.
The dot may be the grande dame of punctuation, but that doesn’t mean it’ll live forever: in the past decade, smart phone technology and formless texting has seriously threatened its formerly-secure dominance. In any other writing, the full stop makes up for half the punctuation. Not so in texting. We don’t need it anymore (gasp!), because we just send a message off, and the bubble makes it clear the thought is done. While there’s some cause for concern, we don’t need to panic. Yet. But that’s another newsletter!
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Paul Robinson got it wrong. The dot may be compact, but it’s certainly not innocent or neutral. It’s head-strong, opinionated, sexy, cute, playful, and dead-serious. All of that. Now head on over to the website of the International Dot Day, and send them your very own!