“You open up this potential to gain knowledge and power and money and all of these development kind of things. You give access to that to foreigners, to women, to young people, to people who are maybe of a lower social class, who haven't had these long years of education. So punctuation has always been a way to democratize, and then also has been in danger of being locked up because of that power.”

democratizing force? Yes, absolutely. And we see that really throughout this entire history of punctuation, there always came from an impulse to make writing more accessible. And that might be ancient or like Greek influenced Egypt. You know, this library in Alexandria that might be Ireland in the 8th century or that might be Egypt in the 19th century. So there's always this impulse to make writing more accessible and understandable for a larger amount of people. In Greece or in Alexandria, it was the librarians who tried to develop this point system, this, you know, or dot system for learners or for readers of their manuscripts who were not native speakers of Greek. And then we have the monks who Are themselves speaking Gaelic, so they're like Irish, and they are translating the Bible from Latin into Gaelic, or like they were copying the Bible and then they were trying to figure out, okay, which does this word mean in Gaelic, and they were kind of copying it above the Latin. And so, again, these are learners that try to get access to something. In 19th century Egypt, people are like the Egyptian elite or Arab writers saw Arabic not being used so much for more mundane day-to-day…