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George F. Will, the noted political columnist who’s no gridiron fan, wrote “Football incorporates the two worst elements of American Society: violence punctuated by committee meetings.”

There’s a colonoscopy looming in my near future, so I couldn’t help noting Will punctuated his statement with a colon, especially because the grammatical colon traces its origins back to a librarian: Aristophanes. He was the head librarian at the famous Library of Alexandria around 200 B.C., and he’d built a notable reputation as a literary scholar before then.

The Encyclopedia Americana says “Ancient and modern scholars have ranked Aristophanes among the world’s greatest philologists because of his studies in general linguistics, accentuation, and punctuation, each of which he either invented or improved.”  In Aristophanes’ day, reading was done aloud rather than silently. Consequently, his system of punctuation was designed to tell readers how much breath would be needed to read aloud the next passage or phrase.

The Greek word for the shortest passage was “komma,” which Aristophanes indicated with a single dot in the middle of the line. A longer passage was called a “colon,” and was indicated by two dots with one below the single comma dot. A third dot was added above for the longest passages, or “periodos.”

Oxford English Dictionary definitions include examples of the word’s earliest known usage, and William Blades’ 1882 biography, “The Life and Typography of W. Caxton,” is the example for “colon.”

Blades wrote, “The Greek grammarians ... called a complete sentence a ‘period,’ a limb was a ‘colon,’ and a clause a ‘comma.’”

Punctuation as we know it didn’t come about until the advent of printing. The first English-language printer was William Caxton, the subject of Blades’ book, and a true luminary of printing history.

The English language was extremely plastic back in the 1400’s, and Caxton used only three punctuation marks: a stroke (/) set off groups of words, a colon (:) showed a pronounced pause, and a period was used to indicate both brief pauses and the ends of sentences. Here’s a sample:

“The thyrde temptation that the deuyl maketh to them that deye. Is by Impacyence: that is ayenste charyte/ For by charyte ben holden to loue god above alle thynges.”

With modern punctuation and spelling, the passage translates as “The third temptation that the Devil makes to them that die is by Impatience; that is against charity. For by charity be holden to love God above all things.”

A century after Caxton, in the mid-1500s, English printers had stopped using periods for pauses, and the stroke was replaced by the modern comma.  The Online Etymological Dictionary (www.etymonline.com) says our word “punctuation” comes from the word “punctuationem,” “a marking with points,” from punctuatus, pp. of punctuare “to mark with points or dots,” from L. punctus “a prick.”

The word “point” came from “a merger of two words, both from Latin ‘pungere,’” to prick or pierce. One was “punctum,” meaning “a small hole made by pricking,” and the other was “puncta,” which the French turned into “pointe” and gave to the English around 1300 A.D.

The earliest attested English sense of “point” was “minute, single, or separate items in an extended whole.” The phrase “possession is nine points of the law” came about in 1627, and it wasn’t until 1776 that “point” meant “a unit of score in a game.” 1903 saw the coining of the frustrated expression, “what’s the point?” One hundredth of a carat became known as a point in 1931 and “the point of no return” was first used in 1941.

Why should we care? The point is that we all want to express ourselves as clearly as possible, and our attention to a properly employed comma can make a subtle but important difference in how our reader perceives us.

Like the poet Robert Frost noted, “Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation. Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you’re going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power.”