Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks

410 Pages·2013·7.37 MB·English

by  Keith Houston

Shady Characters
The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols
Other Typographical Marks
Keith Houston

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York • London
For Leigh
Contents

PREFACE
HOW TO READ THIS BOOK
. THE PILCROW
1
. THE INTERROBANG
2
. THE OCTOTHORPE
3
. THE AMPERSAND
4
. THE @ SYMBOL
5
. THE ASTERISK AND DAGGER
6
. THE HYPHEN
7
. THE DASH
8
. THE MANICULE
9
.QUOTATION MARKS
10
. IRONY AND SARCASM
11
1.Irony in History
2.Ironics
3.Digital Sarcasm
AFTERWORD
FURTHER READING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
Preface

Some years ago a friend recommended a book to me. The book was An Essay
on Typography, written in 1931 by Eric Gill, one of England’s most famous
1
modern typographers. Although it was both diminutive in size and short on
actual instruction (Gill preferred polemic to practical advice), Essay was a joy to
read, full of philosophical asides and painstakingly hand-cut illustrations. Most
of all, though, my interest was piqued by a character resembling a reversed
capital P that peppered the text at inscrutable intervals. What was this ¶ for?
Why did it appear at the start of each paragraph, and between some sentences
but not others?
I hunted down the symbol in my copy of the Typographic Desk
Reference, though its perfunctory definition was less than satisfying. As it
explained, this character was called the pilcrow and once upon a time it had been
used to separate paragraphs:

pilcrow
An old mark, rarely in use today, representing the beginning of a
paragraph or section. Today it is used as an invisible character in word
processing applications to represent a paragraph break. Also called blind
2
P, reverse P or paragraph mark.
This curt description invited more questions than it answered. I started to notice
the same mark in other places: websites, glossaries of other typographic
reference works, and even computer applications such as Microsoft Word.
How did the pilcrow’s curious reverse-P form come about? Was it related
to the letter P, as the TDR seemed to suggest, or was it something more subtle?
What were the roots of its pithy, half-familiar name? What had caused this “old
mark” to fall out of use, and having done just that, why did Eric Gill see fit to
place it seemingly at random in his only published work on typography?
What, in other words, was the pilcrow all about?
A web search yielded a list of books to read and sites to browse. Once I’d
finished with those, I had a heaping pile of notes and a list of yet more sources to
be investigated. The story of this one character took in the birth of punctuation,
the ancient Greeks, the coming of Christianity, Charlemagne, medieval writing,
and England’s greatest twentieth-century typographer. I started to research other
marks—not only those, like the pilcrow, that hovered on the margins, but also
everyday characters such as the dash (—), the ampersand (&), and the asterisk
(*). An ever more diverse set of episodes, actors, and artifacts emerged: the
creation of the Internet; ancient Roman graffiti; the Renaissance; Cold War
double agents, and Madison Avenue at the peak of its powers. Their stories
described a fascinating trail across the parallel histories of language and
typography.
In February 2009, my meandering note-taking and browsing snapped
sharply into focus. While investigating a symbol called the interrobang ( ), a
hybrid question mark/exclamation point created in the 1960s, I came across a
website dedicated to the symbol at www.interrobang-mks.com. At first sight it
seemed unremarkable—a single page bearing a picture of the interrobang and a
few paragraphs relating its story—but at the bottom was an e-mail address for
one “PennSpec.” Without much thought, I dashed off a message asking whether
PennSpec happened to know anything more about the character, and promptly
moved on to other things.
The penny dropped the next day. The “mks” in “interrobang-mks.com”
must surely refer to Martin K. Speckter, the interrobang’s creator; PennSpec,
who habitually sent her e-mails without a signature, had to be Martin’s widow,
Penny. I was astonished: I was corresponding with the wife of the man who had
invented one of the first new marks of punctuation for decades, if not centuries.
The story of the interrobang was suddenly a living, breathing piece of history.
Emboldened, I sought out other people involved in the world of
unconventional punctuation, and more conversations followed. I talked on the
telephone to Josh Greenman, a New York journalist who had invented a sarcasm
mark, and to Paul Saenger, an expert on spaces between words—invisible
punctuation, if you will. I corresponded with Bas Jacobs, the Dutch designer of
an irony mark for the type foundry Underware; with Doug Kerr, the AT&T
engineer responsible for the appearance of the hash mark (#) on telephone
keypads; and with William H. Sherman, the world’s foremost authority on the
“manicule,” or pointing hand ( ), who helped me out of an etymological dead
end.
These typographic conundrums, these shady characters hiding in plain
sight, were too good to be passed over like so many periods and commas. This
book is here to bring them into the light of day, and I can only hope to do justice
to Penny Speckter and all the others who have helped me on the way here.
How to Read This Book

There’s no wrong way to read this book, but be aware that later chapters
occasionally use terms explained earlier in the book. Where possible, cross-
references have been added to help guide readers who jump straight in to a
particular chapter.

Chapter 1 The Pilcrow
T
his is a pilcrow: ¶. They crop up with surprising frequency, dotted about
websites with a typographic bent, for instance, or teaming up with the section
symbol in legal documents to form picturesque arrangements such as §3, ¶7. The
pilcrow also appears in Microsoft Word, where it adorns a button that reveals
hidden characters such as spaces and carriage returns.
For all this quiet ubiquity, the pilcrow gets short shrift in books on
typography and punctuation. Take the trouble to look it up and in most cases the
humble pilcrow warrants only a few lines, dismissed briskly as a “paragraph
1
mark” that is “only appropriate when brevity is important.” More generous
definitions might run to mentioning that it has fallen out of common use and that
2
it is sometimes used to indicate a footnote. No mention of where its reverse-P
shape comes from, or its name; for the pilcrow, this is as good as it gets.
This is a crying shame. The pilcrow is not a mere typographic curiosity,
useful only for livening up a coffee-table book on graphic design or pointing the
way to a paragraph in a mortgage deed, but a living character with its roots in the
earliest days of punctuation. Born in ancient Rome, refined in medieval
scriptoria, appropriated by England’s most controversial modern typographer,
and finally rehabilitated by the personal computer, the pilcrow is intertwined
with the evolution of modern writing. It is the quintessential shady character.
*

T
he orthographic world of ancient Greece was a sparse old place. When
reading a contemporary manuscript, a literate Greek of Homer’s time would be