Mark Your Words Trivia Quiz

Answer: a joystick

No one is certain about the origin of the exclamation point, but one theory is that it is a result of the Latin exclamation for "joy", which is "io". Often, the capital letter "I" was written above the letter "O" in a vertical pattern. The exclamation point did not appear on a keyboard until 1970. Before that, a writer would have to type a period and then backspace to type an apostrophe above the previously-typed period.

Answer: eroteme

In addition to eroteme, the question mark may also be referred to as the query or an interrogation point. Some credit the origin of the interrogation point to the scholar, cleric, and poet named Alcuin who was associated with York and Northumbria in primarily the eighth century AD.

Others claim that it is of a Latin origin. The Latin for "question" is "quaestio", which was abbreviated as "qo" to designate that a sentence was a question. Eventually, the "q" was placed on top of the "o", and the squiggly letter written above a small circle began to look like what we refer to as a question mark today.

Answer: a semicolon

The semicolon or semi-colon is primarily used to join two independent clauses that are closely related in theme or purpose. For example, one might use the punctuation mark in the following manners: "Emily named her stuffed dog Beeble; she enjoyed making up her own names" or "Betsy likes The Beatles; however, she does not care very much for The Rolling Stones". Of course, the semicolon may also be used to separate items in a series that already possess commas; thus, confusion is eliminated by using commas to separate items in a series as is traditionally done. For example, one might write, "I visited San Francisco, California; Reno, Nevada; and Portland, Oregon.

Apparently, Aldus Manutius the Elder, a printer, was the first to use a semicolon in 1494. The first English writer to use the semicolon with regularity was Ben Jonson, the seventeen-century English poet and playwright.

Answer: an apostrophe

The apostrophe can be used to help make a contraction in the English language. For example, one may remove the "no" in "cannot" to make "can't", one may remove the "woul" in "I would" to make "I'd", and one may remove "f the" in "of the clock" to make "o'clock". Furthermore, the apostrophe is used to help alter a noun into a possessive form so that a writer may designate ownership. For example, one may write, "Ben took Stephanie's car to work". Finally, though this use is quickly fading from fashion, some still use the apostrophe to help create plural forms of nouns that are not conventional words of the English language or the plural forms of words that are being referred to as words. For example, one might write, "George needs to remember to dot his i's and cross his t's" or "Cheryl uses too many and's when she speaks".

On a keyboard, typists also use the apostrophe to help create a single quotation mark.

The apostrophe may have entered the English language from an imitation of French use. French writers would use the mark to help demonstrate elision in their writing, such as when they might write "l'arbre" instead of "la arbre" for "the tree".

Answer: Richard bought three fruits-oranges, apples, and pears.

The hyphen is an interesting mark, indeed, with many versatile and controversial uses. Most do agree, however, that a hyphen should be shorter than a dash, should have no space before or after it, and should be used to join two or more words (rather than two parts of a sentence). Thus, one cannot write, "Richard bought three fruits-oranges, apples, and pears", because of the suggestion that "fruits-oranges" is a word. What would be needed in this sentence is a dash, which is a longer horizontal line (sometimes made by typing two hyphens in a row, depending on the keyboard one is using).

Hyphens are used to create compound modifiers, such as "well-written essay", "part-time job", or "two-year-old daughter". Hyphens may also be used with prefixes and suffixes to help clarify meaning. For example, if one doesn't use a hyphen in the sentence "Joseph's doctor decided to re-treat him", then there is a risk that someone may read the word as "retreat", which means "to move back from or to withdraw from" (such as the action of an army that has been defeated by a superior force). Of course, there are some words that exist as hyphenated words, perhaps idiomatically, such as "father-in-law", "editor-in-chief", "will-o'-the-wsip". or numbers (twenty-one, thirty-two, etc.).

The word "hyphen" comes from ancient Greek and means something similar to "under one". Originally, a mark was placed under two words, stretching from the ending letter of one word to the beginning letter of the other, to join the two words.

Answer: braces

The word "braces" is used only to refer to the following marks: { }. These braces may also be referred to as "curly brackets", "fancy brackets", "flower brackets" and "gullwings", among other names.

However, the marks in the diagram are referred to as "square brackets" (or simply "brackets" in the U.S.) as well as "crotchets", "closed brackets", and "hard brackets".

Parentheses, which are rounded like these--( ), are referred to by the British as "brackets" and by still others as "round brackets" or "soft brackets".

There are also angle brackets or chevrons.

Thus, the term "bracket" can be admittedly quite confusing.

Answer: an ellipsis

An ellipsis is a set of three spaced dots. It is used to designate words or information has been left out of a sentence or a paragraph. Sometimes, this omission is used creatively to create tension or to demonstrate that a speaking individual is suddenly speechless.

For example, one might be writing a story in which the main character is about to say something but stops mid-sentence: "Watch out for the . . . " More often, however, the ellipsis is used to omit information considered unnecessary by an individual who is quoting an outside source.

For example, a student writing a paper may be considering quoting the following sentence: "Bill Swannigan, one of the most respected and talented individuals I have ever met, was frequently a victim of depression".

The student might decide to quote this sentence in the following manner: "Bill Swannigan . . . was frequently a victim of depression".

Answer: I gave my mother's necklace : to my daughter Emily.

The colon has a number of functions in Standard American English. As a couple of the answer choices above demonstrate, a colon can be used to direct attention toward an explanation, whether that explanation is a phrase or an independent clause (or sentence). It is permissible to write, "I hate only one thing: grapefruit" or "I hate only one thing: I hate grapefruit".

One may also use the colon to introduce a list of items in a series. However, one should be careful NOT to use a colon after a verb. For example, writing, "The winners were: Kathryn, Anthony, and Andrew" would be most incorrect.

Colons are also used to introduce some quotations, particularly if the introduction to the quotation is a sentence itself. For example, one might write, "Swannigan describes his initial response to seeing his car on fire: 'I thought my entire world had come to an end'".

Colons may also be used to separate a title from a subtitle, such as "Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street".

They are also used in designations of time, such as 11:30, or in scriptural references, such as Psalms 3:5.

Finally, they may be used to follow the salutation of a business letter, such as "Dear Dr. Bones:".

Answer: SarcMark

The SarcMark is intended to designate that a statement should be read with a sarcastic tone of voice. The father and son team Paul and Douglas J. Sak invented the SarcMark and applied for a patent in 2008. Then, in 2010, they applied for a trademark for SarcMark.

They then hoped to sell the mark to people who were tired of sending electronic messages that failed to convey their sarcasm and irony. These individuals would download a program that would allow them to type or insert this mark into their messages. Aside from the controversy arising from an attempt to own a punctuation mark as well as a tone of voice, many wonder why the mark is even needed. If you have to tell someone that you are being sarcastic, doesn't that defeat part of the purpose of sarcasm? If you say to someone, "Oh, boy, ain't you smart" and then follow that with "by the way, I mean the opposite of that", then why not just say, "You're stupid" in the first place?

Answer: Hindi

The term "guillemet" is a derivative of "Guillaume" ("William" in English), and the mark is apparently named for the French printer Guillaume Le Be. Many European and Middle Eastern languages use the guillemets as quotation marks. In addition to those listed in the question's choices for answers are Albanian, Armenian, Belarussian, Catalan, Estonian, Galician, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese (in Europe), Russian, and Ukranian.

Some eastern Asian countries use it as well, such as North Korea and Vietnam. Spanish speakers appear to use the guillemets frequently in publishing but not so frequently in everyday writing.

Some countries, such as Poland and Romania, use the guillemets to designate a quotation within a quotation.