The mark of the modern world?
It is widely accepted that modern written English is suffering from a lack of punctuation. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not great at this stuff. Like most people, I hesitate before I use a semicolon. (I still use them, rightly or wrongly, but I do hesitate.) However, punctuation exists for a very good reason, and it’s a reason I understand. It makes the written language easier to comprehend; punctuation is there to help the reader. Let me give you a couple of examples.
“Pull the other one?”
The question mark at the end of the sentence indicates a question. Let us imagine that the speaker does not know which lever to pull.
“Pull the other one!”
The exclamation mark at the end of this second sentence indicates an exclamation, or, as the dictionary tells me, an abrupt, excited utterance. In this case it might be used as a shouted warning perhaps, if, for example, someone were indeed about to pull the wrong lever.
However in our modern parlance “Pull the other one” is far more likely to be used in a cynical fashion, a comment indicating the lack of belief the speaker has in a previous proposal. This is clearly a very different meaning to the examples above. So how do we show this? What element of our current punctuation can we used to indicate the tone of this comment? The answer, I regret to say, is none.
And so I propose that we create a new device: the cynicism mark. But what is the symbol to be? This is where you come in my friends. We need a design. Something simple to write that can be shoehorned into our texts and essays and newspaper columns, a symbol that will revolutionize modern English and aid every reader in his daily life.
Help me give life to the cynicism mark, the mark of the modern world.