Louis Menand Reviews Punctuation Histories by Florence Hazrat and Sarah L. Kaufman

Key facts

• Louis Menand reviewed Florence Hazrat's "On the Mark" and Sarah L. Kaufman's "Verb Your Enthusiasm" in The New Yorker
• "On the Mark" is published by Basic; "Verb Your Enthusiasm" by Penguin Press
• The published "Persuasion" replaces five dashes and three ampersands and lowercases four capitalized nouns from Austen's manuscript
• William Gifford, an editor at John Murray, is believed to have cleaned up punctuation in Austen's later novels
• Hazrat says the semicolon is "a dreamy kind of mark for meandering minds" and calls the parenthesis "an ethical way of life"
• Hazrat dates the period to Aristophanes of Byzantium in the second or third century B.C.E. and the earliest question mark to a fifth-century Syriac document
• Hazrat credits Irish monks in the eighth century with inventing the space between words
• Kaufman spent years as chief dance critic for the Washington Post and calls verbs "the Cate Blanchetts of language"
• Hazrat reports ninety-one per cent of Americans believe they express themselves better in emojis than in written words