Iconic punctuation
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Following up on our recent post about generational punctuation differences, here's a cartoon from the 7/27 New Yorker:
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July 20, 2026 @ 12:37 pm · Filed by Mark Liberman under Ideography
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Following up on our recent post about generational punctuation differences, here's a cartoon from the 7/27 New Yorker:
July 20, 2026 @ 12:37 pm · Filed by Mark Liberman under Ideography
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Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
July 20, 2026 @ 4:46 pm
May we take this with the same grain of salt applied to, say, Strunk & White or Fowler, or does internet-age prescriptivism hold some sort of mystical sway? I don’t recall my parents scrambling to recalibrate their idiolects every 10-20 years or so, so neither shall I. I kind of like 1980’s Western Pennsylvania English, so I’m going to stick with that — lexicon, capitalization and punctuation rules, grammar, syntax, the whole ball of wax.
Thomas Hutcheson said,
July 20, 2026 @ 5:02 pm
Not quite as silly as tatoos, but getting there.
David Marjanović said,
July 21, 2026 @ 8:02 am
I know people who use "send" instead of periods – every sentence is a separately sent message.
Olaf Zimmermann said,
July 21, 2026 @ 8:20 am
@David Marjanović
I wonder what George Carlin would have made of that.
Philip Taylor said,
July 21, 2026 @ 8:59 am
You take Fowler with a grain of salt, Benjamin ? His guidance is my bread and butter, and I revere the man above all others.
Cedar said,
July 21, 2026 @ 11:02 am
Speaking of terminators, "End Communication" was a funny noe, as an alien impersonating Bill Clinton had said say on the Simpsons ["Treehouse of Horror VII" Oct 27, 1996 S8·E1].
Obviously, the bit was that an alien might not know how humans signal the end of communicating.
As a comic strip: https://frinkiac.com/comic?b=AQIEBlMwOEUwMV8uDwABEvQBygMvQXMgb3ZlcmxvcmQsIGFsbCB3aWxsIGtuZWVsIHRyZW1ibGluZyBiZWZvcmUgbWUABlMwOEUwMfY4DwABEvQBygMcYW5kIG9iZXkgbXkgYnJ1dGFsIGNvbW1hbmRzLgAGUzA4RTAxej8PAAES9AHKAxJFbmQgY29tbXVuaWNhdGlvbi4ABlMwOEUwMc9GDwABEvQBygMcVGhhdCdzIHNsaWNrIFdpbGxpZSBmb3IgeW91LgA&layout=2×2
Stephen Goranson said,
July 21, 2026 @ 12:38 pm
The cartoon title includes "PERiOD," except without the dot on the lower case i.
Too much New-Yorkerish esoterica for me.
Slipped by the Comma Queen?
A mole of whom they are naïve?
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
July 21, 2026 @ 1:09 pm
Philip,
Oh, I'm not saying I don't have "Modern English Usage" front and center on my office bookshelf — I do. It's just that the NaCl is applied by virtue of the differences between formal British English and formal American English.
B.
Philip Taylor said,
July 21, 2026 @ 2:40 pm
Fair enough, Benjamin. There are indeed differences, as you so correctly observe.
Philip Taylor said,
July 21, 2026 @ 2:42 pm
But the title is in caps, Stephen, so a dot (a jot, to be more accurate) would not only be redundant, it would be wrong.
Stephen Goranson said,
July 21, 2026 @ 4:02 pm
Philip Taylor, do you see or not see that the letter I or i is short? Wrong?
Coby said,
July 21, 2026 @ 5:54 pm
Is Penné the cartoonist's name? Or is it a comment on the American habit of putting an acute accent on the final E of Italian words, even if not stressed in Italian (e.g. latté)?
Barbara Phillips Long said,
July 21, 2026 @ 8:32 pm
Here is a very brief bio for him at a site called Cartoonists for Peace:
Mexico
Born in 1986, Jorge Penné started his career as a cartoonist in 2008, at the Mexican newspaper El Universal.
He invented the cartoon Ramón that is published on the famous information website Animal Político. This comic strip illustrates how some children live with technologies such as smartphones, Ipad and social networks.
Between 2013 and 2016, he worked for one of the oldest and most famous newspaper, El Excélsior.
https://www.cartooningforpeace.org/en/dessinateurs/jorge-penne/
Philip Taylor said,
July 22, 2026 @ 3:02 am
Yes, the "I" is short, and therefore odd in that respect, but being a capital letter it is not lacking a jot.
J.W. Brewer said,
July 22, 2026 @ 6:57 am
Are there capitalization and/or punctuation conventions that are particularly characteristic of Western Pennsylvania English as of the 1980's? What are some diagnostic "tells" I can look for in that regard?
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
July 22, 2026 @ 7:20 am
J.W.
W.Pa.Am.En. c. 1980 isn't orthographically any different from other varieties of Am.En.; I was referring more with respect to Br.En. in the vein. But, lexically, nobody is going to convince me that the candy-coated confections asperged upon ice cream are called "sprinkles", for example.
…but I've been in Central New York for over a year now and my vowels are already slipping! I caught myself the other day uttering "both" as /båth/ instead of /bajth/.
Philip Taylor said,
July 22, 2026 @ 9:14 am
So what are the sugar-coated confections "asperged ?!" upon ice-cream called, Benjamin ? As a child, I would have called them "hundreds and thousands", but sadly those idyllic days are long since past …
VVOV said,
July 22, 2026 @ 10:41 am
Clearly the cartoon caption was typed using a Turkish keyboard. PERıOD.
I'm also going to need more explication for what's wrong with calling sprinkles "sprinkles".
VVOV said,
July 22, 2026 @ 10:43 am
Ah, ok, the wikipedia article (which is titled "Sprinkles") asserts that they're called "jimmies" in New England and Philly – and also mentions "hundreds and thousands" and "vermicelli" (!) in the UK.
Jerry Packard said,
July 22, 2026 @ 11:52 am
For me, the tells for the "Yinzer" dialect of W. Pennsylvania – named for its plural form of "you": "yinz” – were the word ‘jagoff’ and dropping ‘to be’ from passive verbs, like ‘The car needs washed’.
Stephen Goranson said,
July 22, 2026 @ 1:37 pm
Philip Taylor, thanks for your reply.
You wrote that the short i sans jot was "odd," but you did not call it "wrong."
Do you recommend I learn your distinction?
J.W. Brewer said,
July 22, 2026 @ 2:00 pm
FWIW I think of "asperging" as a sufficiently vigorous action (intended to have an effect at some distance) that it would be ill-advised as an approach to putting sprinkles/jimmies/whatever. Perhaps my understanding is idiosyncratic or perhaps its semantics are different in the Yinzer dialect, although I can't recall ever hearing it uttered by my Pgh-raised father or my uncles on that side (who had more Yinzer in their idiolects than my dad retained in later life).
Chas Belov said,
July 22, 2026 @ 3:23 pm
I grew up in Pittsburgh and can vouch for Jerry Packard's comment.
After many years in California, I still occasionally will come out with:
yinz
gum band (for rubber band)
needs washed
off by heart (for "by heart")
While I don't think I've ever said "jagger bush" I heard it in my youth.
Based on the comments above, I likely picked up "jimmies" for sprinkles somewhere else.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
July 22, 2026 @ 4:57 pm
From my experience, “jimmies” is Yinzer. “Asperged” just came out for lack of a better synonym for “sprinkled”.
And I’ve often lamented that “jagoff” hasn’t caught on nationally; sometimes someone is being selfish or inconsiderate or recklessly ignorant but isn’t being an a**ho*e, and it seems we could use a word for that.
Philip Taylor said,
July 22, 2026 @ 5:03 pm
I would hesitate to call it wrong, Stephen, because the font designer may have intended it to be shorter than the other characters in the font, for reasons he or she has not felt obliged to disclose. Idiosyncratic (or even highly idiosyncratic, would, I think, perhaps be the best adjective to apply.
Jonathan Smith said,
July 22, 2026 @ 6:51 pm
arguable!! improvement on the gag thanks to the magic of Chatgpt here: dropbox link
So the peeve reflected in comments is that perhaps not this comic per se but "young people" (or some subset) are being judgy (Gen Z speak!) re: text message periods? if so OK.
Stephen Goranson said,
July 23, 2026 @ 6:49 am
Philip, were a font designer to intend a lower case i without a tittle, whether to best call it wrong or idiosyncratic, feel free.
Philip Taylor said,
July 23, 2026 @ 11:08 am
Totally confused, Stephen — why do you describe it as a lower-case "i" ? Every other character in the surrounding rectangle is upper case, so why should the "I"/"i" be an exception ?
Stephen Goranson said,
July 23, 2026 @ 11:31 am
PT, it was a hypothetical, not a description of the cartoon text:
"…WERE a font designer to intend A lower case i without a tittle…."
Never mind
Philip Taylor said,
July 23, 2026 @ 2:21 pm
Sorry, Stephen, this all started with your statement "The cartoon title includes "PERiOD," except without the dot on the lower case i". From that point on, I assumed that we were discussing the "I"/"i" in PER{I|i}OD, not some hypothetical "I"/"i" in some hypothetical font by some hypothetical font designer. I obviously failed to realise that your use of an inverted subjunctive conditional sought to widen the discussion to incorporate other "I"/"i"s.
Viseguy said,
July 23, 2026 @ 6:49 pm
@J.W. Brewer
I do, too — to the extent I've ever thought of asperge as a word at all — because of the "Asperges me" prayer in the Catholic rite for the sprinkling of holy water on a congregation. The closeness of asperge and asperse is interesting. Who would have thought that there's anything in common between the sprinkling of holy water and the hurling of insults? But, etymologically and metaphorically, there is.
Philip Taylor said,
July 24, 2026 @ 3:36 am
Not having any association (or more than a passing familiarity) with the Roman Catholic faith, the only context in which I have ever encountered "asperg" is in Asperger’s syndrome. I was therefore extremelypuzzled by Benjamin’s use of the word as a verb, but as a result of Viseguy's message I finally begin to understand …
David Marjanović said,
July 28, 2026 @ 8:28 am
…if the mass is full Tridentine, which it has hardly ever been in the last 60 years.