I'm Alan Alda and this is clear and vivid conversations about connecting and communicating. Punctuation initially came out of a way to speak.

The Greeks had all of these different formal rhetorical ways of speaking and they had a bunch of kind of specific pauses or pauses of specific lengths called the comma, the colon, and the periodos.

And what would happen is a reader would be given a text which had no spaces,

had no paragraphs, had no punctuation,

it had very little to guide them.

And one of the librarians at Alexandria,

a guy called Aristophanes, he said, okay,

this is just too hard.

When I, a reader, am reading one of these texts,

I'm going to use little dots.

If I come across a very short pause, a comma,

I'm going to put a dot right in the middle of the line. If I come across a medium

pause or a colon I'm going to put a dot at the bottom of the line and if I come across a long

pause or a periodos I'm going to put a point at the top of the line and that was literally the first punctuation so punctual or punctus meaning point

these little points these little dots added by the reader not by the writer. That's where punctuation started.

That's Keith Houston. And that's just one of the stories he has about the strange beginnings of those

little helpers we use trying to make things clear when we write to one another.

But it's not just commis, colons, and periods.

It's also symbols I didn't even know we had names for. Things like Pilcro's, Octothorps, and Interobangs, a whole

menagerie of them. Keith has written a book and has a website devoted to this arcane knowledge and he does it all in his spare time.

You know I'm particularly interested in how what you work on, in a way in your spare time. I mean you become an expert at something

that doesn't have that much to do with your regular job during the day. What's

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