Your guide to the history and nuance of punctuation

Your guide to the history and nuance of four common, and not so common, punctuation marks

How often do you consider the origins of the typical, and atypical, punctuation in your prose? Where do they derive—and what’s up with ampersands?

On punctuation, Oscar Wilde once wrote: “All morning I worked on the proof of one of my poems, and I took out a comma; in the afternoon, I put it back.”

If, like Wilde, you have ever spent too much time pondering the comma—or the exclamation point, question mark and ampersand—then here is your guide.

Commas: Who cares about the Oxford kind?

Ah, the much maligned comma. “It is over-used, under-used and nearly always abused,” said a writer at Oblique Angles blog. Indeed, the comma is dangerous territory for writers. It’s punctuation that some editors prefer and speckle throughout your prose; others revile and remove it with little regard for your tastes.

So from where does it hail?