278 - An Admirable Point - Florence Hazrat

You Are Not So Smart

Science, Psychology, Brain, Business, Mental Health, Culture, Neuroscience, Mind, Health

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 7 January 2024

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this episode we learn about the history of the exclamation point, the question mark, and the semicolon (among many other aspects of language) with Florence Hazrat, a scholar of punctuation, who, to my great surprise, informed that while a lot of language is the result of a slow evolution, a gradual ever-changing process, punctuation in the English language is often an exception to this – for instance, a single person invented the semicolon; they woke up and the semicolon didn’t exist, and then went to bed that night, and it did!

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0:00.0	Mm.
0:02.0	Mm.
0:03.0	uh.
0:05.0	Mm.
0:06.0	Mm.
0:07.0	He pulled down into the middle of the parties and they
0:10.0	and the cool we get by the bed. They went quiet. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.
0:27.0	Episode 278. Oh, One of my most benign pet peeves is how people sometimes ask questions like I wonder who is the first person to think of eating an
0:54.7	oyster or I wonder who was the first person to build a gate like a fence gate or
1:00.8	a garden gate like who came up with that? Or who invented the
1:05.3	semi-colon or who invented ketchup? This is a benign pet peeve because I want people to ask lots of questions, but it comes from the fact that just about everything that surrounds us today, the food we eat, the tools we use, the vehicles we operate, from bicycles to cars to airplanes, none of
1:37.0	them have a single inventor.
1:40.7	Pretty much all of human culture, including our artifice, the artifacts and objects and the culinary delights we create,
1:47.0	they all began by lots of people, combining lots of things, and some of those things slowly evolving generation
1:55.3	by generation, household by household, exchange by exchange.
2:00.9	The present in all its forms arrived via iteration lots of tiny changes, lots of additions and
2:09.9	subtractions until some standards became more popular than others and
2:14.8	there are many factors as to why that would be and the results of all of this
2:19.2	evolution are categories categories like like ketchup,
2:24.0	because there is no one true ketchup,
2:27.0	no single platonic form of ketchup,
2:31.0	no essence, no in philosophical terms, catch-up ground of being.
	...

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