Shady Characters got started in 2010 with a collection of articles on unusual marks of punctuation. Each mark, such as the pilcrow (¶), interrobang (‽) and ampersand (&), is covered in a separate series, and I’ve since added a comprehensive series about emoji. Read them all here:
- The Pilcrow (¶)
- The Interrobang (‽)
- The Octothorpe (#)
- The Ampersand (&)
- The @-symbol
- Irony & Sarcasm Marks
- Emoji (😂)
I continue to post regularly on punctuation, books, emoji and more in an ongoing Miscellany series. There are also more occasional series on Field Trips (journeys to places that may be special interest to readers of Shady Characters), Shiny Characters (forays into the world of typesetting) and Calculators of the Day. You may also wish to take a look at the list of articles I’ve written for publication elsewhere.
Visit the home page, subscribe to the RSS feed, or sign up for email notifications below to get new articles as they appear.
Comment posted by Richard Trevor on
Hi
I have thoroughly enjoyed your blogs and Sha@dy Charac†ers.
I wonder if you have looked into wind symbols at all? Not the artistic emojis: I mean the more scientific circles with barbs or arrows, used to describe wind direction and strength in weather forecasts—but, oddly, unavailable as unicode symbols, which suggests some sort of discordance somewhere.
Comment posted by Keith Houston on
Hi Richard — thanks for the comment! I haven’t looked into those symbols, but I note that there are at least a few weather-related emoji. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before more are adopted?
Comment posted by Bertrand Mougel on
Hi Richard and Keith, just reading this page today. On the matter of wind symbols there is a french author Alain Damasio who wrote an awesome fiction book called ‘La Horde du Contrevent’ (The Windwalkers) and he creates a writing technique in it to describe all sort of wind with a scribe writing all its specific wind language with glyphs!
Comment posted by Keith Houston on
Hi Bertrand — thanks for the comment! As I understand it, Demasio uses special characters to represent some of the characters in the novel, too. Unfortunately, the book seem to remain untranslated. My French may be just about good enough to order a coffee, but it is several orders of magnitude beneath the task of reading a novel!
Comment posted by Kristin Ells on
Loving the book! Chapter 6, figure 6.5 – I’ve looked but cannot find the use of pilcrows used in the text image. Can you share line #? Thanks!
Comment posted by Keith Houston on
Hi Kristin — thanks for the note! The pilcrows are very small — they’re used to indicate notes in the lefthand margin of the page. Each note with a pilcrow then refers to an asterisk in the main body of the text.
I hope that helps!