Delicious little factoid from Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves:

The earliest known punctuation— credited to Aristophanes of Byzantium (librarian at Alexandria) around 200 BC— was a three-part set of dramatic notation (involving single points at different heights on the line) advising actors when to breath in preparation for a long bit, or a not-so-long bit, or a relatively short bit. And that’s all there was to it. A comma, at that time, was the name of the relatively short bit (the word in Greek means “a piece cut off”; and in fact, when the word “comma” was adopted into English in the 16th century, it still referred to a descrete, separable group of words rather than the friendly little tadpoley number-nine dot-with-a-tail that today we know and love.