* <<G1U.0816>> Punctuation (re: [[G18.0901]])
Maybe we just need some new punctuation.
People have been misusing quotation marks for decades as surrogate
emphasis markers. What these people want is the effect of italics or
bold-face text, emphasis or alternative voicing, but they don't have
the marks for it. Nowadays, bold-face and italics are the
typographer's chief means of indicating emphasis or alternative
voicing in text, but prior to the era of movable type, scribes
employed rubrication and illumination to similarly foreground text
— it's not purely an expectation of a typographically literate
populace, it's a fundamental need of people who must rely on the
written word: emphasis, which comes so naturally to us in speech,
must needs be visibly indicated in some way.
We need mid-sentence emphasis marks to enclose words or phrases in,
akin to quotation marks. There *are* some conventions for doing this
— I've just used one of them. *Star-bold*, and /slash-italics/,
and other plain-text markup schemes, which came into use out of
necessity decades ago (even the venerable mechanical typewriter could
be made to double-strike and underline text, but no such expressivity
is afforded in "plain text") and which have seen renewed interest in
the form of Textile, Markdown, and other "plain-text markups", are a
practicable solution to the issue — but I wonder if we mightn't be
better-off with new, single-purpose symbols, instead of overloading
extant punctuation marks. Why? Because, going forward, wouldn't it
behove mankind to make language as unambiguous and machine-readable
as possible?
Using caps for emphasis has the problem of potentially introducing
ambiguity as it obfuscates the capitalization of proper nouns.
--
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©2016 Adam C. Moore (LÆMEUR) <
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