Every 90’s kid will relate to how this otherwise-utter gibberish made sense as a winky-face, before cutesy little graphics-the emojis as we know today took over our digital turf of casual communions. No acrimony towards emojis, though. Emojis, after all were just natural evolution of text-smileys- of numbers. And alphabets. And punctuations.

So coming to it- Punctuations. Why, you ask? Because telling someone that you like cooking dogs and babies without the punctuation sounds disastrous. And then there is this famed anecdote to illustrate it where the professor asks his students to punctuate the line,

‘Woman without her man is nothing’.

While majority did it in this manner,

“Woman without her man, is nothing.”

possible feminists had something else on their mind:  

“Woman; without her, man is nothing.”

That’s why punctuations are a delight. They make or mar the meaning, or sculpt up an entire new facet that would probably never have been thought of. If I were asked to pick a favourite from the fraternity, semi-colons would be it. It may sound all pretentious and made-up, but the playful dash, the expectant semi-colon or the oblivious ellipses do seem to emanate that aura of positivity. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The full-stop tells you that that is that; if you didn’t get the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all that the writer intended to parcel out, and now you have to get along.  Whenever you come across a semicolon or a dash, there is an assurance that there’s more-giving a pleasant little feeling of expectancy. “So you didn’t fully understand what the writer meant? Read on, it would get clear!”- It reassuringly proclaims.

The only time a semi-colon would freak out a mortal would be when the entity in question is a programmer and all his conjuring goes kaput, owing to one misplaced sign. But then, even a wrongly placed piece of Jenga is enough to bring down the condominium of blocks down to dust. A semi-colon’s no exception!

Which brings us to its next kin- the reserved colon. The pair of two periods vertically placed is a lethal combination indeed. It somehow reminds you of the Trump- Kim Jong duo, seeing that they have so much in common- both inflict a sense of tyranny. You encounter a colon in a text and immediately you feel like you are being ordered around- to follow a hierarchy you would otherwise not have taken had you been left to yourself. In a lighter vein, the other source of disdain for it might stem from the fact that information given in academic texts simply adore them, be it classifications, steps or pros and cons. One place where nepotism fails- for even the semi-colons’ grace can’t redeem it from its monotony.

Over-used exclamations or interrogations would be any grammar-Nazi’s eternal pet’s peeve. Poetries have always had that liberty of its wanton usage, because after all, punctuation in poetry has no strict rulebook to adhere to. But when they tend to swarm like minnows at the end of every line’s hook, even poems are robbed of its subtlety. It’s like when you are forced to watch some wannabe jump up and down crazily in the centre of the room shouting to attract attention- much like tooting one’s own horn. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out. And if it is, after all, a banal statement needing more zing, the abundance of exclamation marks simply emphasizes its banality!

The ampersand (&) as we know today once used to be the 27th comrade of the alphabet-cult and has an intriguing origin as well. The 26 alphabets as we know preceded the last one- & or and-per-se (per-se and and having the same meaning).The slow slurring of the word, or linguistic corruption (or linguistic creativity, as some language-enthusiasts define slanging) all resulted into its christening as the ‘Ampersand’. And as for its ostracism from the letters community, no case of felony or treason is recorded yet.

While our generation today is obsessed with hash tags and hammering away words, entire sentences and contents of hardbound encyclopedias all space-less following it (with space utilization more meticulous than Indian local trains during peak hours), it may interest you to know that it was baptized as ‘octothorpe’. From the queerness of the name, #ProbablyDarwinOrMozartwastheBua!

For some deranged reason they got rid of one of the most useful symbols ever created- the interrobang. It’s even fun to say. It is basically a question mark superimposed on an exclamation point which on our keyboard looks like ‘!?’. Obviously, it is intended to represent a question asked in incredulity. This seriously needs  to be back on books, for not all signs can beat being a portmanteau and onomatopoeia simultaneously!