Shady Characters; Ampersands, Interrobangs and other Typographical Curiosities, by Keith Houston, Penguin Books, 2013.
I loved this witty, erudite and fascinating book. I am not sure about the title “Shady Characters…” but otherwise it seems to me pretty much a perfect study of its subject, imbuing the characters with personality and charm. The author is quite rightly pretty tough with those who do not bother to check and corroborate their facts. It also led me off down various tangential paths as outlined below.
The first chapter is about the pilcrow
which I have already written about here:
Index, A History of the, Part I – Animal Wild
Next it is the turn of my favourite, the interrobang, a hybrid of the question and exclamation marks here shown in Aptos (the new Microsoft Word default), Garamond and Calibri, the second being the most elegant as usual for that font.
It is not by any means available in every digital font and mostly MS Word defaults to Times New Roman if you try to insert one. The author points out in a footnote that Ohmer Milton’s book, Will That Be on the Final‽, 1982, is still listed in digital catalogues with a bipartite “?!”
The interrobang, the first new punctuation mark for centuries, a cause célèbre in 1962, led to a whole heap of disputes and spats and is still controversial today. We are told that there are at least five interrobang revivalist groups on Facebook with “memberships ranging from the tens to the thousands.”
The octothorpe, better known today as the hashtag, is described as a “problem child” and “slippery beast”. Originally indicating number or weight its form derives from the LB Bar symbol:
The £ sign, we are reminded, comes simply from the letter “L”, whilst the forward slash or virgule is “S” for shilling in attenuated form.
At this point I started wanting to know more about ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Exchange) and Unicode, the former comprising 128 character codes mapping to numbers 0-127, whilst Unicode covers many more languages. The current version includes 110,187 characters mapping to that number of the available 1.1 million code points. See here for more detail:
What’s the difference between ASCII and Unicode? – Stack Overflow
Then I remembered my Old English studies and used Unicode to create these in Garamond:
“Ye”, using a version of the thorn, as in “Ye Olde” is of course a contrivance. It originated in the late nineteenth-century as a pseudo-evocation of merry old mediaeval England.
The lovely ampersand is here shown in Garamond, Garamond Italic, Lucida Handwriting and Bell MT:
It is simply a version of the Latin for “and” – “et”.
Italic forms are often more intriguing than their plain counterparts. The famous pangram, for example:
the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog
Keith Houston makes clear just how much the letter forms change with these more pertinently chosen examples:
a e f k p v w z a e f k p v w z
They really do reward a close look.
The @ symbol, like the ampersand, is, we are informed, a logogram or grammalogue rather than a symbol of punctuation. It has of course had a new lease of life in the age of the internet.
Chapter Six, “The Asterisk and Dagger [or obelus]” includes discussion of the double dagger, or diesis, and other indicators.
* † ‡
One early variant was the lemniscus which survives as the mathematical division symbol, ÷. I was staggered and fascinated to learn that this is not used in German, where a colon is utilised instead.
The most common use for all of these is to indicate a footnote. This quotation by Yale law professor Fred Rodell amused me: “The explanatory footnote is an excuse to let the law review writer be obscure and befuddled in the body of his article and then say the same thing at the bottom of the page the way he should have said it in the first place …”
The history of the humble hyphen and related symbols is not without its complexities either, especially when it comes to different lengths of dashes (the em and en dashes for example) indicating very different things. Our author deplores the use of the “hyphen-minus” to stand for all. The hyphen was formerly curved and sublinear but this was killed off by Gutenberg’s creation of books using moveable type. It is ephemeral in compound words which tend eventually to fuse together. The dash, often used to indicate an unprintable expletive or other deliberate omissions became a mild epithet of its own: “Well, dash it all, I have had enough!” Unicode now includes 23 distinct dashes. I remember pointing out the importance of the hyphen to a member of staff at Trindledown animal rescue where I used to volunteer. She had written that after eight years service I predated most of the staff. On the subject of blackletter, a.k.a. Old English Text, it seems the word minimum is most often cited as the best example of both the unevenness and illegibility of that typeface:
I have been unable to find an elegant modern manicule in Unicode however (☞ seems rather ugly in comparison to its predecessors), although now we have the thumbs-up and other symbols everywhere. I love that Keith Houston talks of “a battle for the soul of the manicule”. A footnote in this chapter recalls the supreme irony of the identity of the digital book deleted by Amazon even from the accounts of users who had paid for and downloaded it: Orwell’s 1984.
When it comes to quotation marks, there is a mention of Lynne Truss, whose book Eats, Shoots & Leaves, infuriated me and seemed riddled with errors. Do I detect damning with faint praise here and a little mockery? “Tellingly, even noted grammar stickler Lynne Truss cannot muster quite the same ire toward the quotation mark as she does for its companions the comma, semicolon and so on. In addressing quotation marks, the grande dame of professional punctuational disparagement goes big in her opening, declaring that there is ‘a huge amount of ignorance concerning the use of quotation marks,’ but the few desultory pages that follow are as nothing compared with the entire chapters she devotes to the apostrophe and comma.”
Certainly quotation marks are tricky, usage often differing dependent on country of origin, or as recently discussed with James Fleming, nephew of Ian and editor of The Book Collector, after I had written a piece about dust-jackets for it, dependent on what one was taught at school. The form can differ too. In France they use guillemets as opposed to inverted commas (and sometimes dashes):
Quotation marks derive from the diple, first used mostly to highlight text, but also for quotations (especially biblical) which just as today were indicated in numerous other ways such as italicising and other typographic distinctions.
As for the apostrophe (the grocer’s apostrophe has its own notoriety), one of my more curious books on typography and related matters is devoted to it, The Third Word* War, *Apostrophe Theory, by Ian Lee, Thames and Hudson, 1978, a soiled and foxed 4to paperback.
It is hard to describe the contents – a series of photographs, illustrations and collages combined with extremely clever word play. It is impossible to summarise and no handful of examples would begin to do it justice – it has to be seen to be appreciated, although I have found one online review in which it is described as “An ostensibly witty, ostensibly intelligent book that is neither.” It is not a million miles from the work of Harland Miller, the adult nature of which should probably preclude me from posting about it and in any case WordPress would not approve and it would affect the visibility of the entire blog unfortunately. But see here:
Harland Miller Art for Sale: Prints & Originals | MyArtBroker
Whilst looking for the above book, I came across my copy of the comic Valiant 1978 annual, which will be the subject of my next post.
The final chapter of Shady Characters is devoted to “Irony and Sarcasm”. Suggested indicative symbols, irony points, have included an inverted exclamation mark, a vertical line with a small triangle at the top, and a reversed question mark. A French writer, Jean-Pierre Marie Hervé-Bazin wrote a playful “gentle foray into grammar and spelling reform”, Plumons l’oiseau, 1966, in which as well as proposing a character derived from the Greek psi, Ψ, as a point d’ironie, he created other symbols for points d’amour, de conviction, d’autorité, d’acclamation and de doute. Artificial languages are also touched upon in this chapter, for which see also:
Flight Lieutenant Bertram Rota – Animal Wild
There was also the ironieteken from the Netherlands but an unfortunate resemblance to half the insignia of the Nazi SS did not help its fortunes. And the “snark” a period followed by a tilde, .~
This all leaves the overwhelming problem – is a mark of irony self-defeating? If irony has to be signposted is the text still ironic? Should a writer either be able to convey irony or sarcasm without these indicators and if not do better by avoiding it altogether?
Another proposal, with debatable attribution, was to italicise but in, as it were, the other direction, with the letters sloping to the left. The same was suggested for sarcasm, see
It is not a felicitous neologism to my mind. It may yet have some further success, but is probably superseded by 😉 and the slew of smileys and other emoticons now at our disposal.
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