Shady Characters

This is the one hundred third in a series of one hundred five posts on Miscellany. Start at PART 1, continue to PART 104 or view ALL POSTS in the series.

And you’re back in the room!

I recently submitted the manuscript for my next book, Face with Tears of Joy: a Natural History of Emoji to my editor, Brendan Curry, at W. W. Norton. This one was a bit of a whirlwind: Empire of the Sum was published less than a year ago, so writing time has been short. Add in a recent relocation from Birmingham, England to Linlithgow, Scotland (the birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots, no less), along with all of the attendant upheaval with jobs and schools and houses, and it has not been a restful few months 😅

That said, Face with Tears of Joy was a fun book to write, harking back, in some ways, to the style and content of Shady Characters. You could even call it a sequel, if you like. One thing the two books definitely shared was a reliance on a community of enthusiasts who were ready to help whenever I needed to dive into some obscure aspect or another of the subject at hand. Emoji are not as old as punctuation (or are they), but there are already strong traditions of emoji historiography, lexicography and archaelogy — to the extent that I was rewriting the first few chapters of the book until the last day before my deadline, as older and older emoji were uncovered.*

All of this is to say that I’m simultaneously happy to have had the opportunity to write Face with Tears of Joy while also very glad to have some down time on the book-writing front.

Now that I have some spare time to play with, I’m going to try to get through some of my backlog of links. We kick off this week with a few recent stories and articles on punctuation. I’ll post similar round-ups for books and calculators in the coming weeks, but for now, off we go!

Here in the UK, North Yorkshire council has announced that it will no longer use apostrophes when making new street signs.† The Guardian presents the example of “St. Mary’s Walk”, and says that the change is supposed to make it easier to handle street name searches within their databases.

We saw a very similar story play out back in 2013. Then, it was Mid Devon council doing the apostrophe down, and, with only three Mid Devon street names actually in possession of an apostrophe, I was broadly on their side. A decade on, and I am minded to take the opposite view. As a software engineer by trade, I am perplexed by North Yorks’s justification for dropping apostrophes: yes, a rogue apostrophe can play havoc with a carelessly written computer program, but dealing with punctuation in English language texts is just part of the cost of doing business. If you’re going to forgo apostrophes, do it for principled reasons, not because they are moderately annoying for the IT crowd.

But perhaps I shouldn’t worry too much. Within days of that 2013 episode, Mid Devon’s council leader had reversed the council’s decision, saying he found it “[un]acceptable that incorrect grammar was being used on the council’s street signs.” And in 2014, Cambridge city council would institute and then roll back a similar apostrophe ban after a public outcry. I have my fingers crossed that North Yorks will soon see the light.

Strong Language, the blog on sweary language edited by Stan Carey, is always a good read. In this entry from last year, Nancy Friedman explores the cr**t*ve use of ast*r*sks at a zeitgeisty style newsletter called “Blackbird Spyplane”. Friedman’s article is worth your time, as is dipping your toe into the cheery linguistic brutalism of Blackbird Spyplane itself, but here is the scoop behind Blackbird’s asterisk usage, as told to Friedman by Blackbird’s editor, Jonah Weiner:

1. I learned from listening to [the podcast] Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig that a good-natured upbeat conversation that’s full of bleeped curses is just funny on a formal level, and I wanted to try to simulate that in print, and relatedly 2. I tend to use so many curses that it might risk feeling a bit too harsh in aggregate without the asterisks softening the effect.

There you have it.

In writing Face with Tears of Joy, I spent a lot of time in the weeds of the Unicode standard, the document that governs how computers encode and exchange text. It is, believe it or not, a fascinating subject, and that is at least partly because of the sheer scale of the endeavour: to encode every character that humans habitually write with, or habitually wrote with. That ambition leads to occasional anomalies: emoji are one, for reasons that I cover in my book, and Unicode’s Japanese “ghost characters”, where seemingly meaningless characters have somehow made it into the standard, are another. Paul O’Leary McCann explains how it happened.

Back in March 2023, I visited St Andrews in Fife, Scotland, and was charmed by the faux-medieval premises of J&G Innes, booksellers. I was also intrigued by a sign above their door:

That sign took me down a historical rabbit-hole to discover how this shop in Fife could be related to the earliest printed American dollar sign. (The full story is in that earlier article.) One thing I wasn’t able to do was pin down the origins of the dollar sign itself, but long-time Shady Characters reader Alex Jay has since got in touch with an origin story that I hadn’t known about at the time.

Alex pointed me towards an article in The Business Man’s Magazine, November 1906, in which writer E. L. Wilson discusses a book published in 1797 — the same year as the first printed dollar sign, and barely two decades after the nascent USA had declared independence. The authors of that book, called the “American Accomptant”, described how the States’ many and varied currencies could be reconciled with one another, and called out the symbols that should be used to denote the resultant “federal currency”. Those marks were one slash (/) for cents, two slashes for dimes and an ‘S’ overlaid by two slashes for a dollar. The slashes, Wilson theorises, may have come from Britain’s habit of separating shillings and pence with a slash (“5/6”), while the ‘S’, rather more tenuously, is speculated to be a way to distinguishing American dollars from British pounds, which were usually abbreviated ‘L’ after the Roman libra pondo, or “pound in weight”.

Was Wilson, writing in 1906, onto something here? Answers in the comments, please!

Finally, I must say thank you to all of the people who have written in about Empire, and who continue to write in about The Book and Shady Characters. It is always a treat to hear about readers’ experiences with calculators, books, punctuation and typography. Information technologies all, as I realised the other day, each in its own unorthodox way. Please keep your them coming!

*

A special hat-tip to Matt Sephton for some juicy tidbits on that front. ↢

†

Never let it be said we don’t love a street sign here at Shady Characters. ↢