Nuts and Bolts: Herve-Bazin's punctuation.

 Jean-Pierre Hervé-Bazin (1911 - 1996) was a writer (and French, obviously). He invented an almost completely phonetic way of spelling the French language (which is actually a sensible idea: if you think English spelling is bizarre...) and as part of this system he invented six new punctuation marks or points d'intonation.

These weren't actually anything much to do with intonation, more to do with clarity. This one, for instance:

makes the shape of a heart (more or less) and implies love. There were also symbols for acclamation, authority, doubt, conviction and irony.

Sadly, in that time of typewriters and lead type new punctuation marks were never going to catch on.

Still, now we have emojis:

illustration by Google - https://github.com/googlei18n/noto-emoji/tree/v2018-08-10-unicode11/svg/emoji_u2764.svg, Apache License 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76925285

 so the principle has a life, even if the symbol itself didn't.

Thing To Use Today: a question mark? The word question comes from the Latin word quaerere, to seek.