Punctuation has *everything* to do with love! Want to up your online dating game through emojis and exclamation marks? Asking yourself why you never get answers to your Tinder profile? And why do people who pepper their messages with emojis ha

An Admirable Point: Highlights from my Book on !

Nov 4th, 2022 1h 7m

I've been silent on this podcast for a while, because I've been busy writing, editing, and (finally!) publishing my book on the wild life and times of the *drumroll* exclamation mark!!! (Surely that deserves three of 'em!) It came out in the UK

How to Write Seduction: A Few More Glyphs

Feb 12th, 2022 46m 3s

The handful of signs at our disposal nowadays (! or ? or ; or *), they need to do an enormous amount of work in terms of clarifying sentence structure and transmitting appropriate emotional intentions of the writer. What if we had more marks at

All you Need is Love (and a few other Emotions): New Punctuation for Children's Stories

Jan 8th, 2022 35m 59s

What big teeth you have, grandma! Mirror, mirror, on the wall... Fairy tales are replete with great emotions, pleasant and not so much. Anger, joy, disgust, surprise, fear, love -- what if there were signs encoding all of them at eyesight?Desi

Holy Punctuation: A Conversation

Jul 29th, 2021 55m 54s

Nothing less than the salvation of your soul -- when it's about understanding the meaning of God's words, it's crucial to get it right. That's why all three "religions of the book", Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have developed systems of pu

Any Questions?

Jul 20th, 2021 53m 44s

What's the right size of a dog? Do you look forward to being a pensioner? Are you using a basket for picknicking? What did you do at bandcamp? Do you mind my asking so many questions? If you're looking for answers, stop listening. If you are c

An Admirable Point: The Screamer, the Slammer, the Dog’s Dick, the Exclamation Mark

Mar 17th, 2021 52m 31s

Yo!!! Join me on a journey from medieval manuscripts to text messages, comics, music, linguistics, and chess, and discover the where and why of the !!!!! Also, what's the town with the most ! in its name? Listen in and find out. Or rather 'out!

Saving the World One Comma at a Time: A Conversation

Mar 6th, 2021 49m 21s

How would you explain memes to Shakespeare? Can you be funny with climate change? And why is death too awful to gets its own line in a poem? Join me in a conversation with poet Nadia Lines about writing, the pandemic, ecology, old poets, young

Beside the Point: Fate and Future of the Paragraph

Feb 4th, 2021 1h 21m

Digitization has rung the death knoll to many a punctuation mark, and other features of navigating the text like paragraphs and indentation. Or has it? Surprisingly, the simple act of dividing a text through blank lines into paragraphs has not

This. And Elsewhere: The History of the Index

Oct 28th, 2020 1h 12m

What do fingers and books have in common? They point. To this. To elsewhere.An index helps with that, that of the hand, and that in a book. But how did books actually come to have them? And what are they useful for?This episode traces the dev

Against Rules

Oct 4th, 2020 43m 36s

Of the impossibility of imposing rules on an unruly system. Are you a stickler when it comes to grammar or punctuation? Then don't listen to this one. Some thoughts in defence of an expansive sense of language (read, in defence of mistakes an

Part 2 of Part 2 of the History of Punctuation

Aug 31st, 2020 52m 4s

I continue the long second part of the history of punctuation, exploring mini-biographies of the parenthesis, ellipses (DOT DOT DOT), and quotation marks. From the Renaissance, I also rush through to the present day, touching on digital punctua

Part 1 of Part 2 of the History of Punctuation: Late Medieval to Early Modern

Aug 31st, 2020 45m 49s

Apostrophe, semi-colon, comma, parentheses, ellipses, quotation marks -- six marks and counting within 200 years. How come there is an explosion of punctuation marks in between 1400 and 1600? What were the intellectual and technological factors

Nothing is but what is not: Punctuation which isn't.

Aug 19th, 2020 28m 38s

What do you think about first when you hear 'punctuation'? Dots, dashes, question marks, right? But what is the most important punctuation was no punctuation at all...? In this episode, I explore...nothing. In praise of emptiness!

Not Lost in Translation: By any other Name

Aug 11th, 2020 30m 15s

How did punctuation marks get their names? Are they called the same in different languages? And what can the names of marks tell us about our attitudes to language, and our cultural identities? Have a listen if you want to know what the comma h

The Shape of Them

Aug 6th, 2020 33m 50s

Why do we use dots, why does he exclamation mark look like it does, and what do emoji have to do with it? In this episode, I share some thoughts on the shape of punctuation marks, how they came to look like the way they do, and why that's effic

Mind the Gap: The History of Punctuation Part 1

Jul 31st, 2020 41m 54s

In the beginning there was the word, ANDTHEWORDWASWRITTENLIKETHAT -- and nobody was able to read at first sight!In this episode, we explore why the Greeks and Romans were bad at punctuation, and how bunch of monks from Ireland invented the sin

What is punctuation & why should we care about it?

Jul 28th, 2020 1h 24m

Is an emoji a mark of punctuation? What's the use of exclamation marks? And can punctuation save lives? This launch episode explores what punctuation is (and isn't!), and why we should slow down and pay attention to it. Mind your dots and dashe