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Miscellany № 65: from gnomonology to palaeography

September 20, 2015

Palaeography is the study of old writing. And as often as I’ve had to hunt through old manuscripts for points (·), pilcrows (¶), virgules (/) and the like, I am not a palaeographer in anything more than the loosest sense. Given this, was a pleasant surprise to find myself chairing a session at a palaeography conference called DigiPal V, held at King’s College London just a couple of weeks ago. I was there at the invitation of Stewart Brookes, King’s College’s resident digital palaeography specialist, who kindly moved me sideways from presenter to chair when I pleaded an inability to come up with a decent paper in time.

Shady Characters at the BBC

September 2, 2015

In lieu of a post this week, head over to BBC.com’s Culture section to read my article about “The Mysterious Origins of Punctuation” — it’s hot off the presses! Want to chat about it? Post a comment here or over at the related Facebook post. Shady Characters readers will be right at home, and I hope you enjoy it!

Miscellany № 64: let’s gnomonise

August 17, 2015

Readers! Have you ever wanted a better name for “marks of punctuation”? No, me neither. And yet that is exactly what drove James Brown (no, not that one) to produce the page shown here in his rambling, esoteric An English Syntithology: In Three Books, Developing the Constructive Principles of the English Language of 1845.1

Miscellany № 63: punctuating the summer

July 23, 2015

I’ll be on holiday this coming week, enjoying the final stage of the Tour de France in Paris with my wife Leigh (as she put it when she suggested the trip: “lycra is optional, the Louvre is not”), but here are a few punctuational links to tide you over until I’m back.

The imminent death of the paragraph

July 12, 2015

As I mentioned last time, I recently took part in a workshop on the subject of “punctuation in practice”. My presentation there was titled “Ghostwritten: the vanishing pilcrow”, and it traced the life of the paragraph mark from ancient marginal dash (—) to medieval capitulum (¢) to pilcrow (¶), as shown in the slide reproduced above, and finally to empty space, or paragraph indent ( ) — all things I’ve talked about here, and in the Shady Characters book, at some length.