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A review by hammo
Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston
3.0
A valiant attempt by Keith Houston to make a book about punctuation interesting. It had it's moments, but on the whole it was still a thoroughly boring book.
Notes:
ncient Greek writing was in "sciptio continua": it had no spaces or punctuation. It was also in "boustrophedon" (ox-turning), meaning it alternated left to right and right to left.
Aristophanes of Byzantium, 3rd century librarian of Alexandria, introduced a system of "distinctiones" to indicate when to take breaths when reading a text aloud. The system consisted of "intermediate", "subordinate", and "full" dots, at the middle, bottom, and top of the row of text, and indicated short, medium, and long pauses respectively. They were placed after the rhetorical units the "komma", "kolon", and "periodos", respectively.
Sometimes births are indicated with an asterisk and deaths with a dagger, eg "Albert Einstein (*1879)," or "Herman Melville (†1891)"
The origin of "@" is obscure. Perhaps the French "à", perhaps the Latin "ad".
Lorem ipsum is a deliberate jumble of Cicero’s 'On the Ends of Good and Evil'
The ampersand & is a stylized "et". During the 19th Century it was taught as the last letter of the alphabet: "x, y, z, and - per se - and", which was mangled into its current denotation.
The modern pound sign is just an "L" (libra) with a bar through it.
Ok, so a libra pondo was the "pound" unit of weight. Charlemaigne decreed that a pound of silver would make 240 denier coins. By convention, there were 12 denier to one Byzantine soldius coins. From which we get the words pound, livre, lira, Pfund, sol, sou, shilling, Schilling, dinero, penny, Pfennig, and soldier (who were payed in soldius).
"The Roman term for a pound (unit of weight) was libra pondo. Libra = scales, pendere = to weigh. Hence "pound" is written "lb", despite having neither "l", nor "b" in it. Further, "lb" used to sometime have a bar through it, which became the pound sign / octothorpe / hashtag / #.
""One might forgive the Almighty for His melodramatic use of capitals when one recalls that His subjects had not yet developed lowercase letters.
Marcus Tullius - Cicero's slave and secretary (who eventually became a freedman) - invented a system of Latin shorthand called Tironian notes. The Tironian "et" looks like "⁊" and was the loser of a long competition withe ampersand for the dominant way of denoting "and". Weirdly, it's still the standard way of denoting "and" in Gaelic.
The astisks was originally used to annotate inaccurate translations: if a passage was missing, it would be added with an asterisks. If a passage was spurious, it would be indicated with an obelus, which today survives as a division sign "÷" or dagger. I skimmed this chapter so may have gotten the details a little wrong.
"Allegedly, seventy translators (or seventy-two, in some tellings) were assembled on the island of Pharos, just off Alexandria, and presented with the Hebrew text; retiring to consider it separately, they emerged from seclusion to find that all seventy-odd translations were identical. Taken as proof of the miraculous nature of the translation, the resulting text came to be known as the Septuagint"
"Perhaps the most famous footnote of all, and one that surely would have to be invented did it not already exist, occurs in the Reverend John Hodgson’s magnum opus, his six-volume History of Northumberland, published between 1820 and 1840.53 In a work already renowned for its thoroughness, the third volume further distinguished itself by dint of a mammoth 165-page footnote describing the history of Roman walls in Britain."
One Barry Bonds is arguably history's best baseball player. And a good name for it too. But he came under suspicion of steriods, and so people would hold up signs of asterisks when he played well (in reference to asterisks which would appear in debated sports record books).
Ancient Greek hypphens were bowed lines under words, like ties or slurs in music notation.
Around the zeroth Century, Romans started separating words with periods. During the 2nd Century they regressed to Greek-style no separation between words. It wasn't until the eighth century that Celtic monks started putting spaces between words to make reading Latin easier.
The text columns in the Gutenberg bible were perfectly justified. To achieve this, Gutenberg deployed many versions of characters, including ligatures, and hyphenated ruthlessly. For example, one line might end with "e-" and the next start with "-rgo".
Victorians would censor their writing with dashes, like "d--- you to h---". Thus Lord Ronald Charles Sutherland-Leveson-Gower once said "Who the Dash is this person whom none of us know? and what the Dash does he do here?"
The arrival of the typewriter and its limited character set led to "the great typewriter squeeze", in the words of one unnamed blogger.
I podcast I've been listening to lately is Harmontown, hosted by Dan Harmon of Rick and Morty fame. Harmontown once did a live tour, and in every new city X, Dan would joke "here's some facts about x: the typewriter was invented here". Thanks to Shady Characters, I got a second layer to this joke. The first typewriter was invented by Christopher Sholes in Milwaukee. Dan is from Milwaukee. So from his perspective "the typewriter was invented here" is like a normal attribute of a city.
Another intersting thing about the first Sholes typerwrtier: it had two rows of piano keys. The lower keys were letters, and the upper keys were all the digits except 0 and 1. You were supposed to use "I" and "O" for those.
There used to be a whole zoo of dashes. But they were compressed to a one-size-fits-all dash-minus during the great typewriter squeeze. This is the symbol seen on modern keyboards.
An example of quotation from the 5th century:
> HESAIDINTHEBEGINNINGTHEREWASTHEWORD˙
Another from the 6th century:
HESAYS IAMINTHEFATHERANDTHEFATHERINME
And from the tenth century:
hesays. iaminthefather &thefather inme˙
The ">" to indicate quotation is called a diple
> Like this.
After some confusion, a convention emerged to display diples in print as a pair of commas. At first they were marginalia. Then they were brought into the main text itself. Then they were used to explicitly open and close quotation, and thus we have the modern inverted commas.
"Verbs of speaking retreated first to parentheses within the dialogue itself and were later ejected from quoted speech entirely to lie between two separate quotations"
French quotation goes like this:
« Hullo there!
— Hi! Who're you?
— I'm bob! »
Mid 20th century English professor Ivor Richards thought that the quotation mark was overloaded (quotation, scare quotes, references to words themselves...). So he wanted to use letters to disambiguate the meaning of quotation marks. So rather than table, you would have wtablew, but with the "w"s superscripted.
"The concept of irony got its name—though not yet an attendant mark of punctuation—in ancient Greece, where playwrights employed a cast of stock characters made recognizable by their physical characteristics, props, and personalities. One such staple of comic plays was the eirôn, a seeming buffoon who would best the alazon, his braggart opponent, by means of self-deprecation and feigned ignorance, and it was the cunning eirôn who gave his name first to the Greek eirôneia and then to the modern term 'irony'."
John Wilkins was a 17th century natural philosopher who "posited the possibility of extraterrestrial life on the moon (and designed a flying machine to get there); speculated on the construction of submarine “Arks”; wrote the first book on cryptography in English; and fabricated transparent beehives that allowed honey to be extracted without killing the bees inside" and wrote 'Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language' which was an attempt to construct a perfectly logical and scientifically correct language. In Essay Wilkins also introduced the inverted exclamation mark "¡" for irony.
The last chapter is a rather boring account of the many suggestions through history of how to indicate irony or sarcasm. Of course, indicating irony is rather like explaining a joke, so these suggestions were either clueless or themselves ironic. For example, there was the suggestion to indicate irony by slanting letters the opposite way to italics and call it "ironics".
Notes:
ncient Greek writing was in "sciptio continua": it had no spaces or punctuation. It was also in "boustrophedon" (ox-turning), meaning it alternated left to right and right to left.
Aristophanes of Byzantium, 3rd century librarian of Alexandria, introduced a system of "distinctiones" to indicate when to take breaths when reading a text aloud. The system consisted of "intermediate", "subordinate", and "full" dots, at the middle, bottom, and top of the row of text, and indicated short, medium, and long pauses respectively. They were placed after the rhetorical units the "komma", "kolon", and "periodos", respectively.
Sometimes births are indicated with an asterisk and deaths with a dagger, eg "Albert Einstein (*1879)," or "Herman Melville (†1891)"
The origin of "@" is obscure. Perhaps the French "à", perhaps the Latin "ad".
Lorem ipsum is a deliberate jumble of Cicero’s 'On the Ends of Good and Evil'
The ampersand & is a stylized "et". During the 19th Century it was taught as the last letter of the alphabet: "x, y, z, and - per se - and", which was mangled into its current denotation.
The modern pound sign is just an "L" (libra) with a bar through it.
Ok, so a libra pondo was the "pound" unit of weight. Charlemaigne decreed that a pound of silver would make 240 denier coins. By convention, there were 12 denier to one Byzantine soldius coins. From which we get the words pound, livre, lira, Pfund, sol, sou, shilling, Schilling, dinero, penny, Pfennig, and soldier (who were payed in soldius).
"The Roman term for a pound (unit of weight) was libra pondo. Libra = scales, pendere = to weigh. Hence "pound" is written "lb", despite having neither "l", nor "b" in it. Further, "lb" used to sometime have a bar through it, which became the pound sign / octothorpe / hashtag / #.
""One might forgive the Almighty for His melodramatic use of capitals when one recalls that His subjects had not yet developed lowercase letters.
Marcus Tullius - Cicero's slave and secretary (who eventually became a freedman) - invented a system of Latin shorthand called Tironian notes. The Tironian "et" looks like "⁊" and was the loser of a long competition withe ampersand for the dominant way of denoting "and". Weirdly, it's still the standard way of denoting "and" in Gaelic.
The astisks was originally used to annotate inaccurate translations: if a passage was missing, it would be added with an asterisks. If a passage was spurious, it would be indicated with an obelus, which today survives as a division sign "÷" or dagger. I skimmed this chapter so may have gotten the details a little wrong.
"Allegedly, seventy translators (or seventy-two, in some tellings) were assembled on the island of Pharos, just off Alexandria, and presented with the Hebrew text; retiring to consider it separately, they emerged from seclusion to find that all seventy-odd translations were identical. Taken as proof of the miraculous nature of the translation, the resulting text came to be known as the Septuagint"
"Perhaps the most famous footnote of all, and one that surely would have to be invented did it not already exist, occurs in the Reverend John Hodgson’s magnum opus, his six-volume History of Northumberland, published between 1820 and 1840.53 In a work already renowned for its thoroughness, the third volume further distinguished itself by dint of a mammoth 165-page footnote describing the history of Roman walls in Britain."
One Barry Bonds is arguably history's best baseball player. And a good name for it too. But he came under suspicion of steriods, and so people would hold up signs of asterisks when he played well (in reference to asterisks which would appear in debated sports record books).
Ancient Greek hypphens were bowed lines under words, like ties or slurs in music notation.
Around the zeroth Century, Romans started separating words with periods. During the 2nd Century they regressed to Greek-style no separation between words. It wasn't until the eighth century that Celtic monks started putting spaces between words to make reading Latin easier.
The text columns in the Gutenberg bible were perfectly justified. To achieve this, Gutenberg deployed many versions of characters, including ligatures, and hyphenated ruthlessly. For example, one line might end with "e-" and the next start with "-rgo".
Victorians would censor their writing with dashes, like "d--- you to h---". Thus Lord Ronald Charles Sutherland-Leveson-Gower once said "Who the Dash is this person whom none of us know? and what the Dash does he do here?"
The arrival of the typewriter and its limited character set led to "the great typewriter squeeze", in the words of one unnamed blogger.
I podcast I've been listening to lately is Harmontown, hosted by Dan Harmon of Rick and Morty fame. Harmontown once did a live tour, and in every new city X, Dan would joke "here's some facts about x: the typewriter was invented here". Thanks to Shady Characters, I got a second layer to this joke. The first typewriter was invented by Christopher Sholes in Milwaukee. Dan is from Milwaukee. So from his perspective "the typewriter was invented here" is like a normal attribute of a city.
Another intersting thing about the first Sholes typerwrtier: it had two rows of piano keys. The lower keys were letters, and the upper keys were all the digits except 0 and 1. You were supposed to use "I" and "O" for those.
There used to be a whole zoo of dashes. But they were compressed to a one-size-fits-all dash-minus during the great typewriter squeeze. This is the symbol seen on modern keyboards.
An example of quotation from the 5th century:
> HESAIDINTHEBEGINNINGTHEREWASTHEWORD˙
Another from the 6th century:
HESAYS IAMINTHEFATHERANDTHEFATHERINME
And from the tenth century:
hesays. iaminthefather &thefather inme˙
The ">" to indicate quotation is called a diple
> Like this.
After some confusion, a convention emerged to display diples in print as a pair of commas. At first they were marginalia. Then they were brought into the main text itself. Then they were used to explicitly open and close quotation, and thus we have the modern inverted commas.
"Verbs of speaking retreated first to parentheses within the dialogue itself and were later ejected from quoted speech entirely to lie between two separate quotations"
French quotation goes like this:
« Hullo there!
— Hi! Who're you?
— I'm bob! »
Mid 20th century English professor Ivor Richards thought that the quotation mark was overloaded (quotation, scare quotes, references to words themselves...). So he wanted to use letters to disambiguate the meaning of quotation marks. So rather than table, you would have wtablew, but with the "w"s superscripted.
"The concept of irony got its name—though not yet an attendant mark of punctuation—in ancient Greece, where playwrights employed a cast of stock characters made recognizable by their physical characteristics, props, and personalities. One such staple of comic plays was the eirôn, a seeming buffoon who would best the alazon, his braggart opponent, by means of self-deprecation and feigned ignorance, and it was the cunning eirôn who gave his name first to the Greek eirôneia and then to the modern term 'irony'."
John Wilkins was a 17th century natural philosopher who "posited the possibility of extraterrestrial life on the moon (and designed a flying machine to get there); speculated on the construction of submarine “Arks”; wrote the first book on cryptography in English; and fabricated transparent beehives that allowed honey to be extracted without killing the bees inside" and wrote 'Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language' which was an attempt to construct a perfectly logical and scientifically correct language. In Essay Wilkins also introduced the inverted exclamation mark "¡" for irony.
The last chapter is a rather boring account of the many suggestions through history of how to indicate irony or sarcasm. Of course, indicating irony is rather like explaining a joke, so these suggestions were either clueless or themselves ironic. For example, there was the suggestion to indicate irony by slanting letters the opposite way to italics and call it "ironics".