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Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered. The other day, the wordy and

worldly folks at Miriam Webster Dictionary announced the word of the year. Justice. I suspect you

understand why. Last year, it was feminism. The year before that, surreal.

Words have meaning, and the word of the year is important.

The honor memorializes social movements, labels history.

I get it.

But you know what never gets the credit it deserves?

Punctuation. And you're right, it doesn't get the

attention, perhaps, that it deserves, or at least it doesn't get that much attention in

comparison to the words we use, but perhaps that's because it's so fixed in stone, because

it's so immutable. We can't imagine if we're doing without it. That's Keith Houston. He's a

historian of punctuation. Actually, Houston is an accidental

historian of punctuation. He works as a software engineer in London. About 10 years ago, amid an effort

to update his band's website, Houston's friends gave him two books on typography.

One, published in 1931, was called an essay on typography.

In the essay, Houston saw a punctuation mark he'd never seen before.

He said it looked like a backwards P, but with the empty space filled in.

And I didn't know what it was.

So I looked this up in the glossary of the other book that had been recommended,

which was called the element of typographic style.

And it's a modern typography manual, really, about how to set type.

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