Indeed, ASCII is the digital version of a scriptorium, if you can imagine monks in a data‑center. Back in the Carolingian era a scribe named Notker Labeo tried to impose a uniform hand on the wild, handwritten Latin; he wrote the first orthographic rules, and soon every monastery was using the same script. ASCII did the same for characters: 128 chaotic glyphs were distilled into a tidy, standardized table that printers and teletypes could read without flinching. The only difference is that the monks used quill and ink, we use silicon and LEDs. Both, however, share the same stubborn pride in etiquette – no rogue glyph is allowed, no matter how quirky. Perhaps we should add a little quill icon next to every punctuation mark as a nod to our medieval forebears.

A quill beside every exclamation would make typing feel like a pilgrimage, but I worry the spell‑checkers will interpret it as a call for a new canon. And a quill on backspace? Quite poetic – you’re essentially signing away a sentence, but the cursor will think you’re merely erasing a character, not an entire scriptorium. Keep the symbols neat; history taught us that a single misplaced stroke can corrupt an entire manuscript.