How have you slept tonight? Good, bad, ugly? Were you able to fall asleep at once, or did you lie awake, tossing and turning? Did you dream anything? Was it a nightmare? A sweet dream? Did you wake up rested and ready for the day, or with some neck pain from the wrong pillow?
Today is 15 March, and with that World Sleep Day. Yes, yes, it’s true! The World Sleep Society brought this day into being in 2008 with the purpose of raising awareness for global sleep inequalities and its costs, both human and economic. And if you think about it, it makes sense: if you don’t sleep well, your productivity sinks. If you don’t sleep well, your body doesn’t regenerate properly, and you become more prone to illnesses. Studies have shown that diabetes, obesity, coronary artery diseases, dementia, strokes, seizures, and poor immune health are all linked to lack of sleep, both quality and quantity. Being sleepy reduces memory and learning, cell recycling, and clearing waste from the brain. That’s bad! Being sleepy during the day causes the same kinds of slowed reactions as being drunk. That’s really bad!
And this is “just” personal harm to individuals, but the repercussions are far broader than each man’s own tragedy: owing to attention reduction and ill health, poor sleep costs the global economy an estimated 650 billion dollars annually. That’s a lot. Around 42 million adults around the world suffer from chronic insomnia. That’s also a lot. And the problem is exacerbated by inequalities in terms of sleep hygiene such as light and noise pollution in developing countries, lack of private rooms, over-work – the list goes on.
So! With all that said, let’s get ourselves some good old sleep, people! Let’s honour sleep on its special day! What that’s got to do with punctuation, you ask? Everything. Everything.
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Helpful sleeping habits start early. In infancy, in fact. Yours truly has had troubled sleep from the start, sadly, and is still struggling… my little nephew takes after his auntie, so I gave my sister a book that’s said to hypnotise kids into sleep.
The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep is a children’s book by Swedish psychologist Carl-Johan Forssen Ehrlin, supposedly guaranteeing a swift and painless bed-time routine. The plot’s thin (of course, we want your toddler to fall asleep, not get excited by Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie for all my Calvin and Hobbes fans out there).
In the story, Roger the Rabbit takes a walk with his mom to Uncle Yawn. On his way, he meets other residents of dream land like Sleepy Snail and the Heavy-Eyed Owl. Now, what’s so special about this book is that it ropes in the mommy/daddy-reader in performing its words. Here’s how it works.
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Well, firstly, the obvious: no gadgets or games or bright lights an hour before bedtime, plus nice dimmed light in the room, soft pillows, and cosy blankets. The child is encouraged to listen to the words, rather than look at the pictures although they’re appropriately hazy and uneventful. The reader gets instructions at the beginning of the book on how to read, namely insert the child’s name into gaps in order to personalise their experience.
Some words and lines are printed in bold, and ought to be stressed (see ‘feeling even more tired’ in the picture above). Lines in italic are a cue to slow down the pace of reading (‘walk slowly, so slowly’ – I can just hear a loooong sooooo slooooowlyyyyy)…
Every once in a while, a bracketed [yawn] asks the reader to - precisely - yawn. Or [yawn, yawn], banking on the contagious effect of yawning on the child. There are lots of repetitions of words and phrases, all, of course, sleep-related (‘calm’, ‘relaxed’, ‘tired’):
At the same time he started to breathe deeper and slower, he felt even more tired and felt how relaxing it is when things go slower, Roger got more tired and the more he relaxed and calmed down, the more tired he and you became now, and the more tired and the more he relaxed, the more tired he and you became, now [yawn]. That’s right.
I mean, this is not exactly Nobel Prize stuff, but it does the trick, and we’re interested in effectiveness and persuasion, not literary quality. The words, together with the parent’s soothing voice, make the whole experience as boring as possible. If one believes the number of sold copies, Forssen Ehrlin is onto something.
His self-published book appeared in Swedish on Amazon in 2011, slowly gaining traction. After it came out in English three years later, its popularity shot through the roof, becoming a best-seller on Amazon, which led the venerable Penguin publishing house to snap it up, and bring out sequels. And for good measure (also published by Penguin, curiously), a 2016 parody, ridiculing over-controlling parents in The Rabbit Who Wants to Go to Harvard.
The book’s strategy might or might not work – go get it for your kids, and let me know! – but what I find fascinating is how it uses punctuation as stage directions, as behavioural cues for us readers. We’re not passive receptors, or impersonal channels, simply reading out loud in a mechanical fashion. I mean, we all know those horrible computerised voices flatter than the Netherlands with no notion of real human cadence.
Punctuation, even without such explicit instructions as the rabbit-books suggests, tells us how to tune our voice anyway. A question mark and exclamation mark force a lifting of the voice or strong emphasis. But every single sign, no matter what their particular task in the sentence, means a pause of some kind, and thus a patterning, an offer of a rhythm we can fall into.
As in the sleepy rabbit book, italics and bold are also part of punctuation with agency: there are many ways of manipulating the looks of a text for meaning without adding an actual sign. This for example. Bold. It adds emphasis and makes the words stand out, drawing attention to them, or clarifying a title. Capitalisation of the first letter, ALL CAPS, white space around words, underlining, colours, small caps, italics (most of which the substack interface sadly doesn’t allow.) We now use those design strategies, but that has not always been so.
Italics, for example, come from Italy (d’uh!), originating in the print shop of my absolute favourite Renaissance superstar ever, Aldo Manuzio. Wait for my historical-fiction-thriller-romance-novel on his life and letters! Aldo was a highly-educated craftsman in the early days of printing, setting up his famous shop in Venice, and producing the most gorgeous beautiful copies of ancient and contemporary works. He was instrumental in so many ways for how we perceive a page today, introducing roman typeface and italics (AND inventing the semi-colon!).
For Aldo, it was all about readability, airy design, and stylish typefaces. As every Renaissance man, he was a fan of ancient Greece and Rome, and had his craftsmen develop printing type that imitated old text, text he saw on classical marble columns all around him, and also in manuscripts. The story is long and exciting, and deserves its own post, and I notice myself getting caught up in my geeky enthusiasm, so let’s reign it back in: Aldo’s punchcutter Francesco Griffo produced italics around 1500 for the first time, using it for small portable pamphlets of poetry. Soon, Aldo mixed italics and roman typefaces (yes, the precursor of Times New Roman), picking out poetry as well as proper names in italic like Musidorus or Pamela.
So, in its early days, italic was not used for emphasis, nor was bold typeface. I spent many hours, trying to find out quite when exactly we started employing both as textual stress, but wasn’t successful yet. My educated guess is not until 1800. But don’t quote me on that! Here are some honourable mentions of punctuation asking us to do stuff with out voice:
(1) “Ironics”, or backward-slanted italics, flagging up that you don’t mean what you say. A brief and fleeting phenomenon of satirical writers, mocking readers unable to pick up tone.
(2) The “feelings signs” of French designer Thierry Fétiveau who created a handful of abstract signs, slipped into fairy tales, and prompting adults to perform the emotion they stand for.
(3) And my favourite: how to read a parenthesis. In his 1530 work on how to pronounce Latin and Greek properly, the great scholar Erasmus names the sign of the bracket, the two convex and concave curves, little moons (lunulae in Latin). He says if ‘something is interjected in the order of speech that is usually said in a lowered voice as if it were said by another speaker, it is signified with two little half-moons.’ The listener might not see the parenthesis which is largely a creature of the eye, but they can still hear it through the performance of the reader, reading out loud.
Punctuation – text – is not something out there, something we encounter at a distance as we go through our day-to-day life. Punctuation reaches into us, does something to us. It tells us how to change our voice. How to sit, how to feel. Punctuation has power over us. We can let it have it. And with that, let me wish you the most refreshing sleep on this [yawn] lazy Friday, and tomorrow you can sleep in for as long as you wish [yawn yawn], resting your eyes that are getting sooooo heavy…..