I ❤️ PUNCTUATION
What’s love got to do with it?
Gracefully poised wings; white feathers ruffled fluffy, quivering in the breeze; heads slowly and deliberately turning left, right, then left again; necks, long and soft, mirrorring each other’s movements, elegantly inter-twining in a dance of gentle love... Swans. We’ve all seen their magical mating ritual, and if you haven’t, drop everything, and go watch a YouTube video right now!
Swans are the patron-birds of Aphrodite or Venus, the ancient goddess of love. So it behooves us to talk about them, since it’s Valentine’s Day on Friday! The beautiful birds mate for life, and when one dies, the other goes through a grieving process just like humans do. After its loss, the bird will either stay on its home-lake, alone forever, or fly away and find a new place, perhaps a new monogamous mate, or join a flock of the broken-hearted. *sigh*...
Swan-neck-flirting is a tender sight to behold, but it’s also touching, because the couple’s necks make the shape of a heart, when they’re beak-to-beak.
This is also le point d’amour, the “love point“, an imaginary piece of punctuation French writer Hervé Bazin proposed in 1966. ’It is formed by two question marks,’ he notes, ’which, in a way, look at each other and form a kind of heart – at least,’ he adds tongue-in-cheek, ’provisionally’. Bazin was, after all, a satirical writer and the publication, Plumons l’oiseau, an irreverent book about language, spelling, and grammar.
Perhaps the love point resembles the fairy-tale dance of swans, but humans are a different species altogether. It’s not incidental that Bazin should pick two question marks for his punctuation invention. Is this the right person for me? Will they stay? Will I? Perhaps, as much as punctuation itself, homo sapiens in love is both more and less certain of themselves and the other than one might assume. Punctuation has always been subject to change, while also proving remarkable stubborn. Just like the big L.
Love is, undeniably, the thing that keeps the universe together, whatever the Trumps and Musks of the world will have us think. And so, because punctuation deals with anything and everything that is human, commas and colons have something to say about love, too. And a lot. Here are some ways for you to show love in your writing this week.
🩷🦢🩷
Doubly Disembodied: Bridging the Digital Gap
Three dots in a row. Three dots in a row in a bubble. It’s just three dots in a row in a bubble, moving up and down, and yet it’s got grown-up adults´ knickers in a twist over a will-he/won’t-he kinda thing: the typing indicator.
People are stressed out, and not a little, over the three-dot-dance (sometimes displayed as “so-and-so is typing...“) that tells them the other person is live, there, on their phone, composing a message. And why’s that a bad thing? Well. Unless you’re a boomer or have been living under a rock, we all know the following scenarios or combinations thereof: the person is typing...then typing some more....and some more...and then some. This is anxiety-inducing! Because we don’t expect long messages in the informal medium of texting (nor, perhaps, in emails which are more work-context-coded). A long message is likely to have some momentous import, and we humans tend to be pessimistic, so we expect the worst.
What if you see the typing indicator, but then...nothing. No message. Has the person changed their mind or have they just been distracted? If they changed their mind, were they expressing some annoyance, frustration, flirtation, some truth, but then got cold feet? We cannot but speculate, and that makes nervous. Anxiety ensues, not so much because of the message that is eventually sent, but that gap between knowing something is going to come, but not knowing what. Or it never comes, looming over you. This is particularly nerve-wrecking in dating which, nowadays, has a strong texting-component, and may even have originated online on dating apps. This article on the do´s and don´ts of punctuation in dating-texting is nearly 15 years old, and yet it holds true now as it has in 2011. We humans are very very good at picking up even the tiniest of emotional signal through text and punctuation, and if you’ve got a sensitive pre-disposition, you’ll be in for a punctuation-caused ride!
So, if you want to be kind to your lover, don’t leave them hanging. Send that text quickly. Add some gentle emojis. Give some padding. Better yet: pick up the phone, and call! I know, I know. It’s a radical proposal these days.
What’s curious about the typing indicator is that it uses punctuation – the ellipsis or dot dot dot points of suspense – to signal work-in-progress. Something is happening right now, but it’s as yet covered in silence. And it creates doubt in the receiver, sitting on tenterhooks as they do. Dot dot dot was a fitting choice when the indicator was introduced into new technologies and platforms of instant messaging in the early 2010s. (👉🏽You can read all about its curious history in my book on the social history of punctuation, coming out in 2026! Finishing the first draft as we speak… 😮💨)
The punctuation, as well as the speech bubbles in which it comes, and in which our text messages are couched on all devices and in all instant messaging platforms, hint at the single most fundamental aspect of digital writing, and the digital world in general: it’s not real.
Yes, yes, we call it “virtual world“ for a reason, but we’re not really aware just how profoundly odd it all is. The punctuation and the speech bubbles, the emojis, gifs, social media profiles, and video calls are all desperate attempts to return to our natural state: talking. We want to talk. After all, one theory on the origins of language is that we developed mouth-communication, so that we could have our hands free to work *and* exchange thoughts and emotions at the same time. Our natural state of being is to be talking, live, face-to-face, drawing on all the assistants we possess, because we have a body: tone of voice, hand gestures, facial expression, posture. It’s a sophisticated nuanced symphony that is conversation. All of this is gone in writing. In fact, it’s doubly gone in computer-mediated writing.
If you write a postcard or letter or scribble a note on a post-it, there’s your handwriting. There’s your underlining, correcting, space-arranging, folding up, putting somwhere to be found, sending off. You might not be physically present (and that’s why we introduced tonal and emotional punctuation like the exclamation mark or the dash), but your finger traced out words with a pen, your hands held the paper. That’s powerful! And it’s vanished completly when we only ever send a totally disembodied series of zeros and ones across the invisible digital ether, sending and receiving with the same device that does away with individuality. We pretend like it doesn’t matter, but it does. We miss presence, and we miss speech. We gaslight ourselves into believing in the illusion of presence, because we’re doing so much informal writing, but this is a lie. All our writing is computer-mediated, and lagging, ever so slightly. This is important. We are not talking. There is something standing between you and me, and it’s the monstrous unfeeling machine.
🩷🦢🩷
Feeling Punctuation
Of course, this is lavish rhetoric! And it’s supposed to be, since it’s Valentine’s Day Week, and we’re all about exaggeration now!!!!!!!!! Yet, there’s a reason that studies have consistently shown humans are meaner online than face-to-face, and nobody who has been on the internet for longer than a day needs a study to have this confirmed through experience. We’ve got new words for those experiences, too, from cyber-bullying to trolling flaming speech, and “online disinhibition”. Humans are social creatures, so this disembodied mock-talking at the screen taps into the darker potentialities of our multi-facetted souls. But it’s not all doom and gloom: kindness often abounds online, fuelled by the same circumstance of anonymity that also gives rise to easy insults. And that kindness comes across through punctuation.
It is true that our repertoire of punctuation has largely been done developing some 400 years ago, settling into its current convention in Western (and many non-Western) languages since the 1850s. But if you think that this stasis prevents people from proposing new marks, think again: in 2017, Austrian designer Walter Bohatsch has suggested 30 new marks called “typojis” to convey more precise meanings. Bohatsch’s subtleties are a little too subtle, perhaps, including such brainy thoughts/tones/meanings (?) as sagacity, tolerance, and solidarity. I’m not surprised the typojis haven’t caught on (although I love them!) – they’re just too conceptual, and confusingly similar in their abstract shapes – but there’s one I can recommend to you for your Valentine’s Day communication: the point of seduction, appropriately curvy...
Shortly before Bohatsch floated his typojis, French designer Thierry Fetiveau published his fairy-tale-reading typeface Andersen, named after the beloved Danish folkstory writer Hans Christian Andersen. The typeface comes together with eleven “feeling signs“ (apart from Fetiveau’s originals, they also contain Bazin’s love sign) that are supposed to help reading children’s stories out loud while performing the emotion expressed in a paragraph as one is reading it. Before his design-career, Fetiveau was a kindergarten teacher, and his punctuation-innovations stem from his first-hand experience.
As with seduction, I wonder how one would read out “love“. Would you smile, and perhaps slow down your voice, make it a little lower, softer, and put a hand on your heart as you are reading? Is it really necessary to be notified in advance? Don’t we, seasoned adult readers we are, pick up emotional cues from verbs or adjectives throughout the sentence? You see, I’m not so much a fan of punctuation-novelties (although I am a big fan of people exploring and having fun with non-alphabetical characters), because the spectrum of marks we have is overseeable and flexible enough to accommodate for the vast range of needs we have in writing. More is not always more.
We do have a feeling sign already. The exclamation mark (or point if you’re North-American). A well-placed ! on your dating profile increases your chances of a date by 10% according to online dating platform Zoosk. Emojis even more! People who hit the emoji-sweet-spot of not too many nor too few are more likely to get matches, strike up conversations, go on dates, and even have sex. Emoji-people are perceived as more friendly, warm, and approachable, and when you think about it, it probably makes sense.
Emojis express our personality, and, in the right hands, can become superb tools of communication: they don’t “just“ convey emotion (although that, too, and very much so), but they give information about the tone of the text. I wrote about what emojis are and do here, and about their role in dating here. Irony, for example, gets decoded through the winkie face emoji 😉, the laughing emoji 😂, the upside-down emoji 🙃, the monkey-no-see 🙈, or the melting emoji 🫠 (and probably plenty of others representing the opposite of the words they accompany).
Emojis help disambiguate tone in texting, allowing for precisely those slightly edgy communication situations as flirting or sharing feelings where so much can go very wrong, or blissfully right. Someone who knows where to put the right emoji, and who is happy to express themselves creatively and affectionately with emojis, is likely to be a people-person enough to transition successfully from online connection to a social relationship of whatever kind offline.
🩷🦢🩷
Five Punctuation Tips for Valentine’s Day
1) Send hearts. Send emojis! It´s free, spread that stuff like glitter!
2) Don’t leave anyone hanging with the typing indicator.
3) Remember that texting is hard! Give them the benefit of the doubt.
4) Take care over your punctuation and spelling.
5) Call... Nay, go see them! 🚶🏽♀️➡️👀🗣️🗨️🫂💟
🩷🦢🩷
Post Scriptum
Yes, there’s YouTube, Instagram, Tik Tok, videos everywhere, pictures everywhere. One can be forgiven for assuming that we do more looking than reading today, more listening than writing. This couldn’t be further from the truth. We are doing more writing than we ever have in human history, each and every one of us – but it’s informal writing like texting, emailing, or social-media commenting. That’s why it doesn’t feel like we’re writing that much. Or reading much either, but one look at any of the platforms based on images – moving or stills – and it becomes clear there’s plenty of text, there, too. Text on the screen, captions, long comment threads. We just love text!
As a text-kinda-gal, I adore that! As someone who personally and professionally does a lot of thinking about text and its influence over and impact on individuals and social relationships, that’s a little worrying to me, because few of us are truly conscious of the power a dot more or less, or an emoji here or there has on the receiver. So, I want to emphasise tip number 4: taking care.
I find the truest way of showing love – and the most sacred one of receiving it – is taking care. Paying attention. Thinking a little, for a moment or two (or more), how this word and that message will land with the other person. Can I make it softer? Can I cushion the beginning and the end? Can I think myself into their heart, anticipate how they’ll receive it, and give my words the maximum potential of doing good? Of being kind. That takes skill. And time. And an openness to learn. Welcome to being human.
Care, whatever punctuation it takes, is the greatest point d’amour of all. Happy Valentine´s Day one and all! 🎉
