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Miscellany № 68: new year, new interrobang

January 18, 2016

Things have been quiet lately on the interrobang front. Well, no longer. Take a look at this:

That is an interrobang and a half, I’m sure you’ll agree.

So, some context. Pearson is a global publishing and education company with fingers in many pies — schools, higher education, professional development, and traditional publishing via imprints such as Addison Wesley and Shady Characters’s own Penguin Books — that until recently possessed only the blandest of corporate logos. In 2015, however, they decided to come up with a new identity. As Brand New reported, quoting from the press release that accompanied the rebranding exercise:

Shady Characters in Polish is Ciemne typki

January 4, 2016

First things first: happy new year! Welcome back.

For me, the new year has started with a bang: courtesy of Robert Oleś at Varsovian publishers d2d.pl, Shady Characters is now available in Polish! Translated by Magdalena Komorowska and entitled Ciemne typki (I am reliably informed that this is quite a clever pun in Polish), the book is available now from empik.com and other online stores. If you read Polish, have a Polish friend who might enjoy a book about unusual punctuation, or, hell, you already have an English edition and you’re just a damn completist, now’s the time to lay your hands on a copy.

The 2015 Shady Characters gift guide

December 13, 2015

It’s December, and that means it’s time for the second annual Shady Characters gift guide! In no particular order, here are a few gifts to consider for the punctation-phile or language buff in your life.

Last year I focused on mainly non-literary gifts; this year, happily, has seen the publication of a number of new books on punctuation. Here’s the first: David Crystal’s Making a Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation is a combined history and usage guide that explores punctuation in English from medieval monasteries to the internet. I reviewed it for the Wall Street Journal and had a great time in doing so — the first part in particular, in which Crystal takes the reader on a breakneck journey through the history of English punctuation, is a joy to read. More serious than Shady Characters and less judgmental than Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, it’d make a great gift for writers, readers, and teachers.

Shady Characters at the BBC: punctuation that failed to make its mark

November 8, 2015

I had the pleasure, recently, of writing another article for BBC Culture. It’s called “Punctuation that failed to make its mark” and it’s a sort of Shady Characters greatest hits, a compilation of a few of my favourite marks that tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to achieve widespread acceptance. There’s Martin K. Speckter’s evergreen interrobang, or ‘‽’, intended to punctuate an excited or rhetorical question; Bas Jacob’s clever but ill-fated ironiteken, or irony mark, as shown above; and the excellent quasiquote (″), or paraphrasing mark, first sent in to Shady Characters back in 2014 by the late Ned Brooks.

Miscellany № 66: catching up

October 25, 2015

Things have been frantic around here lately. Mostly, I’ve been busy reviewing the proofs of The Book, of which more soon, but I’ve also written a pair of articles for other publications, both of which were a lot of fun to address.