Miscellany № 101: back to our scheduled programming

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:

A picture of a painted sign that reads: "Here stood the house of Bailie Bell, who, before 1744, was an eager co-worker with Alexander Wilson, the father of Scottish type-founding, and John Baine in whose type-foundry in Philadelphia the first $ sign was cast in 1797."
The sign above the door at J&G Innes, St Andrews. (Photo by the author.)

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. ↢

Shady Characters on Alan Alda’s Clear and Vivid podcast

I’m still pinching myself, but recently I had the distinct pleasure on appearing on Clear and Vivid podcast, hosted by the great Alan Alda. I knew of Alan’s work as an actor and writer from the likes of M*A*S*H*, of course, but I hadn’t known that in recent years he has moved into the world of science communication, not least with the foundation of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University, New York.

Clear and Vivid is the podcast arm of Alan’s science communication work, and I was very happy to be able to contribute on the subjects of punctuation and writing. We even took a little detour into the history of counting. Have a listen here, and let me know what you think!

*
There’s a title for connoisseurs of unusual typographical marks, if ever I saw one. ↢

Shady Characters at MacGuffin magazine: interrobang!

The following was published in issue 13 of MacGuffin Magazine. It recapitulates some of the contents of my interrobang series and adds some new details to boot. Enjoy!

The Speckters lived in a postwar apartment near Gramercy Park in Manhattan. Their collection of printing presses lived in a rented apartment across the hall, a three-thousand-pound Columbian press balanced carefully across the beams under the floor. The couple were steeped in the world of printing: their kitchen hosted what they called the “Four Penny Press”, and their apartment(s) were visited by a parade of typographic celebrities such as Hermann Zapf and Steven Saxe.

They shared a day job, too. Martin was a one-time journalist and, during the war, Penny had worked with the Red Cross, but in 1956 they founded an ad agency named Martin K. Speckter Associates, where they attracted clients such as the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones. It may have been a time of loosening social mores, but in a 2012 interview Penny insisted that their firm was a stand-up kind of place. Other agencies might have been swept up in the swinging sixties, but Martin K. Speckter Associates was professional to a fault. Even so, in 1962 Martin would push at some boundaries of a different sort.

Since 1959, Speckter had edited Type Talks, a magazine dedicated to typography in advertising. Out for dinner one night early in 1962, and with four pages still to fill in the next issue, he announced a plan to invent a new mark of punctuation—a mark to be publicised, of course, in Type Talks. He called the agency’s preferred art studio, asking “Is there anybody there who can draw?” The answer was yes, so the Speckters dashed to the studio and stayed for hours, thrashing out the appearance of the mark that would become the fabled exclamaquest. Or the interrobang, where “bang” was printer’s slang for an exclamation point. Speckter could not decide on a name.

Proposed interrobangs from Type Talks, March-April 1962
Proposed interrobangs from Type Talks, March-April 1962, drawn by Jack Lipton of Martin K. Speckter Associates, Inc. (Image courtesy of Penny Speckter.)

The new mark took a bow in the March-April 1962 issue of Type Talks, accompanied by a clutch of examples showing how it mingled exclamation with interrogation: “How do you do?!” lay at the mundane end of the spectrum; “What the hell?!” at the other. To illustrate the article, Jack Lipton, the Speckters’ art director, drew a suite of prospective designs that mixed and matched exclamation and question marks with varying degrees of harmony.

Even lacking a settled form or name, Speckter’s new mark struck a chord with Type Talks’ readers. In the following issue, he aired suggestions for names from the magazine’s mailbox: “emphaquest”, “exclarogative” and “interrapoint” took Speckter’s original formula and ran with it, while “quex” and “rhet” favoured brevity instead. One reader coined the peerless “consternation mark”, but even that gem could not keep up with events in the wider world. Because in the meantime, the Wall Street Journal, New York Herald Tribune, and other publications had got hold of and reported on Speckter’s proposal for a new punctuation mark, and, uniformly, they preferred his own suggestion of “interrobang”.

And then, for four years, nothing. The interrobang lay unused and unremarked. How could it have been otherwise? It was absent from all stages of the content mill: Writers had no such symbol on their typewriters. Compositors had none in their type cases. Linotype operators had no interrobang matrices in their machines. The few interrobangs that made it to the printed page were either hand-drawn or carefully sculpted out of rubber cement, and neither route was quick or easy.

Designs for Richard Isbell's Americana
Designs for the extra bold weight of Richard Isbell’s Americana. (Image courtesy of Fritz Klinke on Flickr.)

Yet in 1966, Specker’s mark made an abrupt comeback. That was the year that a type designer named Richard Isbell decided—unilaterally, say some; at the Speckters’ bidding, say others—to include the interrobang in a showy serif typeface called Americana. The Americana type specimen went all-in on the new mark, with the “interabang” name-checked and printed on almost every page. Isbell’s publisher, American Type Founders, announced that every one of their new fonts would henceforth come with an interrobang. Two years after Americana, a typewriter company named Remington Rand released a key bearing the new mark for some of their electric typewriters, and a year later a competitor called Smith-Corona followed suit.

A 1969 brochure from Smith-Corona showing their interchangeable interrobang key.
A 1969 brochure from Smith-Corona showing their interchangeable interrobang key, a competitor to that of Remington Rand. (Image courtesy of Richard Polt.)

Next, the interrobang stepped into the world at large. The proceedings of a philosophy conference at the University of Western Ontario carried one on the cover, while Interrabang, a lurid murder-mystery movie released in Italy in 1969, hung an interrobang necklace around the neck of one of its female stars. Improbably enough, that same year saw the publication of a collection of Lutheran prayers entitled Interrobang, in which author Normal C. Habel described the eponymous mark as “mystery and madness all in one!”

Had the interrobang finally arrived‽

No. It had not. Interest in Speckter’s mark waned rapidly after that second burst of excitement.

Americana would turn out to be the last metal typeface released by American Type Founders, whose movable type business had suffered in competition with typesetting machines such as Linotypes, Monotypes, and newfangled phototypesetters. But those competing machines were no friendlier to the interrobang: each one supported only a limited complement of characters, with little or no room for a novelty such as the interrobang. Americana would be the character’s first and last appearance in metal type.

Elsewhere, Remington Rand and Smith-Corona’s interrobang typewriter keys had failed to raise much enthusiasm from writers. On the rare occasions that the symbol was used in print, it was more often held up as an object for discussion than put to use as a practical punctuation mark.

The reasons for the interrobang’s decline were plain enough. Speckter’s mark was impractical for writers to use, and almost impossible for printers. It was of dubious usefulness, too, splitting the difference between ‘?’ and ‘!’ when in most cases a jury-rigged ‘?!’ worked just as well, if not quite as elegantly. Nor had the interrobang ever been comfortable in its own skin: half a century after its debut, neither Jack Lipton nor any other designer has succeeded in drawing the definitive interrobang. It is hard to call any typographic symbol a success when no-one can agree what it should look like.*

And yet from one particular point of view—perhaps the only one that matters—the interrobang has succeeded wildly.

The Speckters’ time in advertising coincided with an explosion in computing and computers. A host of companies and countries found themselves developing specialised “character sets”, or lists of typographic characters, that suited their particular computational or linguistic needs. When combined, these different character sets could lead to mangled, incomprehensible text: enter a backslash (\) on an American computer, for example, and it would magically transform into a yen sign (¥) when viewed on a Japanese one. Japan has a name for this phenomenon: mojibake, or “character transformation”.

This welter of competing character sets was finally tamed in 1992 by the publication of the Unicode Standard, version 1.0, by a group of engineers from the likes of Apple and Xerox. Calling themselves the Unicode Consortium, they had created one character set to rule them all: Unicode 1.0 contained north of 28,000 characters drawn from the most popular character sets then in use and included a host of additional characters to boot.

But Unicode was not a free-for-all. The consortium warned that it did not entertain “rare, obsolete, idiosyncratic, personal, novel, rarely exchanged or private-use characters”—an admirable stance, although one that has sometimes led to inexplicable exclusions from the standard. Over the years, a number of characters, symbols, and even entire scripts have been left out for one reason or another. (A 2015 article on the subject in Model View Culture magazine, by Aditya Mukerjee, was entitled “I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name”.)

Except for reasons that remain unclear, the interrobang, a character that was simultaneously rare, idiosyncratic, personal, novel, and rarely exchanged, managed to sneak into the very first version of Unicode. And, since the consortium almost never removes characters, there it has stayed ever since. This is the reason that I can copy-and-paste† ‘‽’ into a tweet or an email and readers across the world will see the same symbol that I do.

Martin Speckter died in 1988, just a few years shy of the interrobang’s Unicode investiture. Penny lived until 2020, sustained by a daily scotch and soda, and was formidable to the last in her promotion of her husband’s creation. She ran a web site dedicated to the mark‡, gave generously of her time to those interviewers who periodically rediscovered it, and accessorised her immaculate outfits with a gold interrobang lapel pin as she did so.

As for the interrobang, it has achieved a kind of accidental immortality etched in the binary of the Unicode standard. No-one may ever use it again, but it will live on all the same, to be forgotten and rediscovered every decade or two by a new generation of users.

*
The interrobangs, like this one (‽), shown here at Shady Characters were drawn by Sindres Bremnes of Norway’s Monokrom type foundry. ↢
†
Good luck finding one on a keyboard; the interrobang may live on in Unicode but it has not yet broken into the hallowed QWERTY layout. ↢
‡
Penny’s site is still live at https://www.interrobang-mks.com/. ↢

Shady Characters advent calendar 2023: the Sinclair Executive

It’s the final day of the first ever Shady Characters advent calendar! I’ve been counting down to Christmas by way of a collection of beautiful, clever, important, and/or outright odd calculators and calculating devices. I hope you’ve enjoyed the series, and happy holidays to you all!

It was 1972 and Sinclair Radionics of Cambridge, England, was riding high. Founded a decade earlier on an excess of pluck and a surfeit of ambition, inventor Clive Sinclair’s company had matured from home-built transistor radios to stylish hi-fi gear. But a visit to the USA had inspired Sinclair to design a new product: the thinnest, lightest pocket calculator the world had ever seen.

A Sinclair Executive calculator. (CC BY-SA 3.0 image courtesy of MaltaGC on Wikipedia.</a>)
A Sinclair Executive calculator. (CC BY-SA 3.0 image courtesy of MaltaGC on Wikipedia.)

The Sinclair Executive was a huge gamble, and an equally huge hack. The calculator’s elegant silhouette was possible only because its Texas Instruments’ microchip was periodically starved of electrons by a circuit designed at Sinclair Radionics. This meant the calculator could run on tiny coin-shaped cells rather than the bulky cylindrical batteries of its competitors.

Some time later, in Moscow, a Russian diplomat thought he was having a heart attack. He was not: instead, his Sinclair Executive had exploded in his shirt pocket. A defective on/off switch had caused the calculator to grow so hot the batteries burst. An official investigation was begun; an international incident loomed.

Or did it?

The story of the exploding Executive seems to have grown out of a real, although much less dramatic incident. Chris Curry, Sinclair’s friend and one-time employee, explained some years later that the batteries had leaked — not exploded — in an Executive belonging to one Lord Rothschild, a British aristocrat. Curry had been dispatched with a replacement calculator to placate Rothschild, who had once been Sinclair’s banker. Thus, if a Sinclair Executive had ever met its demise in the pocket of a notable personage, it most likely happened in England, not Moscow — yet without much proof either way, there remains the tantalising possibility that there is more to the story.

In time, Clive Sinclair would become famous, and then infamous, for a string of other inventions, eventually to be felled by the disastrous Sinclair C5, an electric trike that placed the rider at car exhaust level and came to halt after 20 miles. Yet among his hits and misses, the Executive stands tall. It was driven by a hack, but an elegant one. It was an alluring electronic device at a time when the very idea of consumer electronics was still in its infancy. And maybe, just maybe, an overtaxed Executive popped its batteries in the pocket of a Russian diplomat who had obtained for himself a token of wealth and influence, and gave him the fright of his life.

Shady Characters advent calendar 2023: the HP-35

Welcome to day eleven of the first ever Shady Characters advent calendar! I’m counting down to Christmas by way of a collection of beautiful, clever, important, and/or outright odd calculators and calculating devices. Some come from the pages of Empire of the Sum, some are part of my Calculator of the Day series, and some will be new to the blog. I won’t manage twenty-four posts, but I do plan to hit at least one every other day. I hope you enjoy the series!

Today, a repost of an entry from my Calculator of the Day series. We’re looking at the Hewlett-Packard HP-35, a scientific calculator that today looks quite unremarkable — and yet which, at the time, was revelatory.

Hewlett-Packard HP-35
A well-used Hewlett-Packard HP-35, as many of them were. (CC BY 4.0 image courtesy of the Flygvapenmuseum.)

Depending on the reader’s age, the name “Hewlett-Packard” may evoke calculators, desktop computers or printers. (Or, maybe, nothing at all.) But for the first few decades of the company’s existence, it specialised in electronic “instruments” such as the oscilloscopes, signal generators and other tools that an engineer might use to design or test an electrical or electronic circuit. Conceived by HP’s co-founder, Bill Hewlett, the HP-35 was to be the company’s route out of that niche and into a wider world of consumer electronics.

The thing about the HP-35 is this: unlike many other calculators at the time, no part of it was truly without precedent. Scientific calculators were not new, although they were sized for desks rather than pockets (and nor had anyone thought to market them to consumers rather than engineers). Integrated chips were not new, although they were rarely as complex as those in the HP-35. LED displays were not new, but they were very expensive and not often seen in calculators. What the HP-35 did do that no other device had managed before was to bring all these things together into a package that was portable, powerful, and, crucially, aesthetically pleasing.

HP’s first pocket calculator turned out to be a smash hit. Sold at Macy’s and advertised in Esquire, the HP-35 had an appeal far beyond mathematicians and scientists, and the company could barely keep up with demand. Students sold their cars to buy them. NASA engineers had to lock theirs away to stop them from going walkabout. US army math instructors devised a new course as an excuse to buy HP-35s on expenses. And HP never looked back: the company that had once built engineering gadgets for engineers now aimed its products at the public at large. Some observers, in fact, credit the HP-35 with inaugurating the whole category of consumer electronics; your iPhone, tablet or laptop computer may never have come about without it.

A big thank you to Jim Hughes at Codex99, whose article was the catalyst for my chapter on the HP-35. His writing is excellent, and his site is well worth a moment of your time.