You did what‽ That's cool؟

Why oh why with all the many subtleties of human emotion and human expression do we have only three basic punctuation marks with which to end our sentences?

I often feel constrained by the 250,000+ words available in the dictionary, and to have only three basic ways of ending a sentence? Come on now.

In the 1966 book Plumons l’Oiseau, Hervé Bazin proposed several new punctuation marks, including the following:

Indignation point

Acclamation point

Certitude point

Doubt point

Other uncommon punctuation marks include the interrobang and the irony mark (both used in the title of this post).

We can quibble over the merits of these punctuation suggestions, but it'd be hard to deny that our language (= our capacity for expression) could be vastly enriched with new forms of punctuation.

Just think of how our three options already affect the meaning of a sentence:

The doctor says you have days to live.
The doctor says you have days to live?
The doctor says you have days to live!

An interesting question is, why are we stuck with these three? The answer is probably that there is no obvious mechanism for a punctuation mark to gain widespread adoption. Language is a combinatorial system where new words are spawned from old words, but punctuation marks don't have that luxury. I'm curious to know how the punctuation marks came into existence in the first place.

My libertarian-leaning sensibilities frown at this, but I wonder if the government has a useful role to play. I don't see why not. Governments have had success in introducing currencies that everyone agrees upon, so why not new punctuation marks?

I know that I, for one, would love to see our president at a presser introducing the indignation point.