19 Punctuation Marks You Never Knew You Needed

~I am once again asking you~ to bring back the Exclamation Comma

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…