Even though we navigate daily through a perceptual world of three spatial dimensions and reason occasionally about higher dimensional arenas with mathematical ease, the world portrayed on our information displays is caught up in the two-dimensionality of the endless flatlands of paper and video screen…. Escaping this flatland is the essential task of envisioning information—for all the interesting worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in nature. Not flatlands…. Even our language, like our paper, often lacks immediate capacity to communicate a sense of dimensional complexity.

—Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information

I have the whole punctuation to settle; which in blank-verse is of the last importance, and of a species, peculiar to that composition; for I know no use of points, unless to direct the voice, the management of which, in the reading of blank-verse, being more difficult than in the reading of any other poetry, requires perpetual hints, and notices, to regulate the inflexions, cadences and pauses. This however is an affair, that in spite of grammarians, must be left pretty much ad libitum scriptoris [to the discretion of the writer]. For (I suppose) every author points according to his own reading.

—William Cowper to William Unwin, 2 October 1784

A British man, speaking French … discovers his country as much by the emphasis he lays upon particular syllables, as by any other mark.

—James Burnett Monboddo, Of the Origin and Progress of Language