“Victor Borge . . . suggests that conversation could be improved with audible punctuation—with pops, hisses, whistles, clicks, ticks, crackles, bangs and squiggles audibly punctuating our everyday speech! But as his act ends and the applause and laughter fade away you begin to realize that Borge . . . made a good point when he followed the sentence ‘Was I an idiot’ with a bang and a squiggle. . . . How often have we felt that need!? Or when the query is of greater stress than the emphasis, why not reverse the signals?!”

—Edward Rondthaler, Life with Letters, as they turned photogenic, 1981.