One of my miniprojects was to come up with a genuine new punctuation mark (although not necessarily a new glyph). And the other while I was texting my friend, I had an idea. It’s not the most original of all marks but I liked the moment of epiphany. I also did a brief search and didn’t find this mark defined already (even with a different definition than mine), which was actually surprising.

That mark is a twoperiod. It consists of two periods spaced out about one-third em from each other. It’s meant to convey a confirmation of another speaker’s statement but with an undertone of deeper consequence that brings about a feeling in the speaker using it. The feeling can be negative, such as guilt or sadness, or a positive, such as pride. Often it’s also used to convey a shared context that is not appropriate to bring up (or does not need to be brought up). For example, the following dialogue makes the use of a twoperiod appropriate:

A: What are you doing tonight?
B: Going gambling.
A: Wow. Two nights in a row?
B: I have a problem.
A: I know..

Speaker A uses a twoperiod because he or she not only has additional information about speaker B, but also that information is in some way embarrassing or funny. Perhaps speaker B borrowed a lot of money from speaker A and never paid it back. Or speaker A actually has the same problem.

Note that a different punctuation mark would not quite be appropriate here: a period would convey the information but not the subtext. An ellipsis would normally indicate that speaker A is disappointed (one can visualize speaker A sighing when he/she says “I know…”). Instead, speaker A simply refers to some other context and makes a statement “between the lines” at the same time.

A twoperiod may be accompanied with a slightly rising pitch of the syllable immediate preceding it (as opposed to the ellipsis that would normally mean a lower pitch for the last syllable or the last word).

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 16:53 and is filed under art, discovery, miniproject, whatis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.