Some say the mightiest weapon ever imagined was Anduril — the Flame of the West — the sword that was reforged from the shards of Narsil, which was broken at the Siege of Barad-dûr when Elendil fell to Sauron. You’ll also find plenty of proponents for Mjölnir, the mythical hammer that allows Thor to manipulate the weather, fly, and — when the mood strikes him — open interdimensional portals. And there’s no question that these are absolutely bitchin’ weapons, but let me make a case for the obelus, which means “roasting spit,” and which the ultra-librarian and iconic grammarian Isidore of Seville called The Arrow, because “like an arrow, it slays the superfluous and pierces the false.”¹

As a punctuation mark, the obelus ( — ) gained fame in the 7th century alongside its more celebrated sister, the asterisk, as a mark used in the margins of Homeric texts to single out completely fabricated verses that corrupt and lawless literary critics had tried to sneak into the text for their own nefarious reasons (hence the slaying and the roasting that Isidore was so hyped up about). Later on, it would be paired with some cool dots to make a hypolemniscus (⨪) and a lemniscus (÷), eventually regaining its awesome reputation as the most swashbuckling, street-fighting glyph around by combining the dots and the dash to become a dagger (†), which nowadays mostly does the asterisk’s job when the asterisk gets tired.

Isidore didn’t invent the obelus, but they did make him a saint (presumably he committed some miracles above and beyond his work in the grammatic arts), and in 1997 Pope John Paul II made him the official patron saint of the Internet. If you want to ask Isidore for help when you go online, you should pray to God that

“Through the intercession of Saint Isidore, bishop and doctor, during our journeys through the internet we will direct our hands and eyes only to that which is pleasing to Thee and treat with charity and patience all those souls whom we encounter.”

It’s just incredibly solid advice that no one ever takes.

Isidore settling down for some light reading after a hard day of slaying the superfluous with his holy punctuation arsenal

The actual inventors of the obelus — a trio of deadly mercenary librarians² named Zenodotus, Aristarchus, and Aristophanes of Byzantium — had a few other arrows in their quivers. These absolute legends were responsible for the dots that would go on to become the comma, colon, and period, but they also collaborated to produce the dotted antisigma (Ꜿ), which was used to indicate that a writer was repeating himself, the diple (>), which was used to indicate a passage of particular interest, and the dotted diple (>·), to mark passages where one of our librarians disagreed with another of our librarians about how they were using punctuation in the first place.

Some diples in the Gospels (6th Century A.D.)

Another punctuation mark with an impressive bit of historical pedigree is the pilcrow (¶), sometimes called “The Blind P,” which sounds like something one does in the middle of the night on a camping trip. She looks a lot like a backwards P, and she is familiar to most people as a glyph that appears all over your document and refuses to go away when you press the wrong button in Microsoft Word. But her real role is to mark the place where a paragraph begins and ends — an incredibly useful piece of technology back before anyone had thought to invent line breaks.

A 15th Century German manuscript about gunpowder, marked with a Pilcrow

The reason Lady Pilcrow looks like a backwards P is that she is in fact a “c.” The “c” stands for capitulum, or “head,” meaning the head of a section that she marks. As time went on, typesetters would get fancy with the “c” and draw a line through it (like so 𝇍) until it evolved into the glyph we’re (somewhat) familiar with today. Hilariously (or tragically, depending on how attached you are to the pilcrow), the folks in charge of illuminating manuscripts got so caught up in making insanely ornate pilcrows that more and more space had to be left between paragraphs for the pilcrow to be inserted. Often, a deadline would prevent the illuminator from having time to fill in the pilcrows, so the manuscript would go out into the world with just the empty space, until eventually folks realized we didn’t need the pretty pilcrows after all. And that is the story of why we indent paragraphs. The indent is just a gaping hole where a pilcrow used to be.³

Isaac Newton’s rather intimidating version of ℔

Around the time that the pilcrow was doing its vanishing act, the punctuation mark with the coolest name of all was beginning to make its mark on the world. The octothorpe (#)— less interestingly called the hashtag or the pound sign — started life as an lb, which was the abbreviation for “libra pondo,” the Roman term for a pound (pondo) in weight (libra). Bored typesetters started connecting the letters with a cool little bar (like so — ℔), and it evolved from there into a #. A similar thing happened with a version of lb that dropped that unnecessary b. As the lone l became more stylized and acquired its own horizontal bar (called a tittle), it eventually became the British pound sign (£). So £ and # are descended from the same grandaddy, which — I’m just going to go ahead and say it — is extremely interesting.⁴

I’m running a bit long here, so I’ll leave you with a few more recent innovations in the art of punctuation that have never properly taken off but which are tons of fun to think about.

The because sign (∵) is essentially the underground, hipster cousin of the much more successful therefore sign (∴), but it doesn’t get much use outside of analytical philosophy.

The breathtakingly glorious exclamation comma (which sadly is not included in unicode, so I can’t display it here) will free you from the tyranny of having to end a sentence just because you are excited about something. And its brother-in-arms the question comma lets you pause to raise a typographical eyebrow without abandoning your thought entirely. It’s ideal for people who are confused but determined.

A piece in The World Herald about the invention of the Interrobang

The interrobang (‽) is a combination of the exclamation and the question mark that’s for when you want to be surprised and emphatic all at once.

The commash (, — ), and its brothers-in-arms the colash (: — ), the semicolash (; — ), and the stopdash (. — ) lived full and rich lives from Shakespeare’s time all the way through the Victorian era, but they’ve more or less died out today, which is probably for the best.

Finally, the irony mark (⸮) is one of many mostly failed attempts (dating back to 1580) to popularize a symbol that can be used to indicate that a writer is making a joke — something that would be singularly useful for anyone attempting to convey nuance on the Internet. But until it finds its footing, those of us who do occasionally try to be funny online without being misunderstood will have to do what we’ve always done — send up a prayer to St. Isidore of Seville and ignore the comments.