Guess Who Is to Blame for Punctuation Marks .!:;,"??. . .

Having a hard time with those commas or semicolons? Does punctuation, and that red (or purple) ink on your papers, give you a headache?

The authors of On the Dot: the Speck That Changed the World (Humez, 2008) lay the blame squarely on an ancient Greek named Aristophanes of Byzantium. He was the librarian at the Museum of Alexandria in Egypt. So, go ahead and blame a librarian, but not this librarian! They write that he is generally credited with devising the first system of punctuation in the Western world. Aristophanes “. . . created a system of three dots (low, middle, and high) to address a problem of vital interest to the readers of his day: how to tell where (and for how long) to pause and take a breath while reading out loud.” (Humez 2008, x-xi).

Apart from all those breathless Greeks and Egyptians, the authors caution not to judge Aristophanes too harshly for his "invention." Kathryn Lasky explains in her childrens’ picture book, The Librarian Who Measured the Earth, “Before this, one word ran into another with no spaces between them. There were no question marks, periods, or exclamation points either. Reading was hard!”

just imagine trying to read the following without punctuation marks it would be pretty difficult how about typing a web address what a jumble the comics wouldnt be half as much fun either if characters couldnt react with !**!#?*!! as they often do and you all know what that stands for or so Ive heard texting would be tough carol said forget about database searching it doesnt work well without punctuation marks

Whether you think of the librarian Aristophanes as a problem solver, or a problem maker, he was a librarian who changed the world forever with, three... little.. dots.

Carol Scamman cscamman@sfasu.edu rm. 202e 936.468.1710 Subjects - Art, English, Modern Languages, Social Work, Sociology, Theatre

Name the librarian that wore a dress, carried a gun and was one of the most feared men in America.

"This one time Library worker enrolled in a work-study program for government employees at George Washington University in D.C. To qualify for the program, he got a job working for the Library of Congress....

By working at the Library of Congress, he had a chance to watch Herbert Putnam, a master in the art of bureaucratic empire building. In Putnam's stewardship over the library, he made it one of the most efficient parts of the federal government.

This Librarian did well at the Library of Congress. In his four years and a half years there (1913 to 1917), his pay rose steadily to $70 a month.

Later he found the skills he learned as a librarian invaluable....

Suddenly America faced the menace of Communism and our character took a leading role in fighting it. He responded to this new challenge immediately. "The former librarian set up a card index system listing every radical leader, organization, and publication in the United States...within three months he had amassed 150,000 names and by 1921 some 450,000."(Gentry)

He immersed himself in reading everything he could get his hands on about the Communist movement. To fight this enemy he had to thoroughly understand it and its objectives. He was preparing himself to become the most knowledgeable person in government on the subject. As Powers points out, these growing files on various radical movements gave him "a semi-monopoly over a sort of information so difficult to obtain, so extensive in coverage, and so commonly inaccessible as to make its independent verification almost impossible."

This ultimately provided the power and foundation of the now famous and infamous life of......... J Edgar Hoover :)

Court TV Crime Library

	R. Philip Reynolds preynolds@sfasu.edu rm. 202b 936.468.1453 Subjects - Computer Science, Military Science, Philosophy/Religion, Political Science/Geography