Miscellany № 42: ¡gnaborretni?

Photo by Alasdair Gillon.
Photo by Alasdair Gillon.

Happy new year! Are you ready for a hair of the dog? Earlier this month, Dr Jesús Rogel-Salazar, a physicist with interests in quantum mechanics, ultra cold matter, nonlinear optics, computational physics — and punctuation, as it turns out — got in touch on Twitter to ask:

Any idea if inverted interrobangs are/were in use, or are still people using the ¡combination?/¿combination!

Dr Rogel-Salazar didn’t say so explicitly, but I understood his question to refer to the use of punctuation in Spanish, where questions and exclamations are book-ended by normal and rotated marks, like ¿this? and ¡this!

The interrobang, of course, is this mark, ‘‽’, the single-character union of ‘?’ and ‘!’ invented by Martin K. Speckter back in 1962. Since then, however, “interrobang” has also passed into (relatively) common usage to refer to the use of both marks at the end of a sentence, thus: ‘?!’ or ‘!?’.

Now there is technically an inverted interrobang intended for use in Spanish and culturally-related languages such as Catalan and Galician. (Assuming that your browser can display it, it looks like this: ‘⸘’.) As far as I know, the “gnaborretni”, as it is called, is a purely theoretical mark; while the interrobang occasionally surfaces in public (notably in an opinion of the Court of Appeals), I don’t recall ever having come across a gnaborretni. I passed Dr Rogel-Salazar’s query on to Alasdair Gillon, a friend of mine who lives and works in Spain, to see if he could shed some light on it. Here is his reply:

I have never seen the ¿combination! Not anywhere. I may have seen ¡¿this?! once or twice.

Actually, especially in social networking, the upside down marks are disappearing altogether, and people are just going with the rest of the world. You never see it in WhatsApp, SMS or Facebook messages, etc.

I have definitely never seen the inverted interrobang. In fact, I would say I’ve never seen an upright one in Spain, except perhaps for this advert for wine [top right], which caught my eye in Barcelona recently and made me think of you. What else could it be?

What else indeed?

So, have any Shady Characters readers come across the gnaborretni, in either its pure (⸘) or debased forms (¡¿)? Is Spanish losing the pleasing rotational symmetry of its questions and exclamations?

Miscellany № 41: a cornucopia for Christmas

Time for one last grab-bag of punctuation goodies before Christmas and New Year. First comes a story courtesy of the American TV quiz show Jeopardy (yes, I’m as surprised as you are). The basic idea behind Jeopardy, for the uninitiated (as I was, until my wife made me watch Saturday Night Live’s “Celebrity Jeopardy” sketches), is that contestants are given the answer to a question and must tell the host, Alex Trebek, the corresponding question.

Earlier this month, a contestant asked for an answer from the catch-all “Pop Quiz” category. This is what she received:

HE FATHERED
BASEBALL *
BARRY BONDS1

The question to this answer, incidentally, is “Who is Bobby Bonds?”, though eagle-eyed readers will also have noticed the unusual replacement of the word “STAR” with an asterisk. Why would the Jeopardy producers do this? The reason lies in Bonds Jr’s record-breaking 2007 season: on the strength of what was otherwise a middling year, Bonds broke the thirty-year-old career home run record to finish the year with a staggering 762 career home runs.2

But by replacing “STAR” with an asterisk, Jeopardy was very likely not celebrating Bonds’ stellar 2007 season. The problem with Bonds’ incredible record — and the reason that he is now haunted by the asterisk — was the alleged steroid use that helped him perform this surpassing feat of athleticism. In 2008 he was convicted for obstructing justice during an investigation into doping within high-level professional sports, and the nagging asterisk began to be associated with his name wherever it was mentioned.3 In the end, even the ball with which he made his record-breaking home run was (literally) branded with an accusing asterisk: clothing designer Mark Ecko bought the ball and had a ‘*’ lasered into its surface before donating it to the Baseball Hall of Fame.4

Jeopardy, then, was poking fun at Bonds rather than celebrating his career. There’s lots more on Bonds, George W. Bush, and other notables who have been dogged by an unhelpful asterisk in the Shady Characters book, but for now, let’s bask in a rare public appearance of this most accusatory of punctuation marks. (Rare, that is, except for the asterism you see below!)

In other news, Erik Kwakkel, medieval book historian at the University of Leiden, recently posted an excellent a picture of some rather surprisingly manicules at his Tumblr blog. Erik’s blog is a veritable treasure trove of medieval curios, and punctuation-philes will find much to enjoy.

Next; semicolons. You’ll have to watch all the way to the end of the this entertaining but entirely NSFW video to find out what I’m talking about. (This video contains some strong language.)

And lastly, Stan Carey tweets with this photograph of the Tironian et (⁊) in the wild. Perhaps it’s time for a revival?

In closing, that’s all from me for 2013. Thank you all for reading over the course of the past year, and thank you even more for buying the book now that it’s in the shops. If you give it as a gift, I hope it’s well received; if you receive it, I hope you enjoy reading it.

Have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year, and see you in 2014!

1.
SportsGrid. “Did ‘Jeopardy’ Take A Shot At Barry Bonds?”.

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2.
Baseball-Reference.com. “Barry Bonds Statistics and History”.

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3.
Slater, Matt. “From Balco to Bonds, Baseball’s Asterisk Era”. BBC, April 14, 2011.

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4.
Curry, Jack. “Barry Bonds Ball Goes to the Hall, Asterisk and All”. New York Times.

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An author asks: what is the ‘§’ called?

First, thank you to everyone who came along to the Waterstones Christmas Cracker on Thursday! It was great to see so many familiar faces there, and to meet some new ones too. James Robertson, who read from his new novel The Professor of Truth, asked me a question as were were packing up to leave: what is the name of the ‘§’ symbol?

I’ve always known it as the section sign, or section symbol; Robert Bringhurst (The Elements of Typographic Style)1 and Theodore Rosendorf (The Typographic Desk Reference),2 my go-to typographic references, agree. It seems odd, though, that this eminently shady character has no other name. Have you come across any other names for the pilcrow’s partner in crime?

1.
Bringhurst, Robert. “Section”. In The Elements of Typographic Style : Version 3.2, 317. Hartley and Marks, Publishers, 2008.

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2.
Rosendorf, Theodore. “Section”. In The Typographic Desk Reference, 74. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 2009.

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Meet the author! Waterstones West End, Edinburgh, on 12th December

I’ll be at Waterstones in Edinburgh’s west end on Thursday, December 12th, at 6pm, to do a short reading as part of Waterstones’ Christmas Cracker event.

This will be my first live event. I am apprehensive.

Also there will be James Robertson, Angela Jackson, Andrea Gillies, and Gavin Francis. Exalted company! Join us for readings, mince pies, and a glass of wine or two.

The event is ticketed but free; call 0131 226 2666 for more details. It would great to see you there!

Miscellany № 40: Emoji Dick and the ANGRY Full Stop

With Winterval approaching, and bearing in mind the concomitant need to find gifts for our nearest and dearest, may I present a gift that I would dearly love to receive: Emoji Dick; or 🐳. This is, as editor Fred Benenson explains, “a crowd sourced and crowd funded translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into Japanese emoticons called emoji”; Shady Characters readers will be well aware of the general concept of emoticons, of course, and emoji are effectively an expanded set of such symbols composed of graphical images rather than typographic marks.

As a fan of Melville’s most famous book, and, well, a blogger and writer on the subject of unusual punctuation, I don’t think I have to explain just how loudly this book speaks to me. Benenson talked to Sally Law at The New Yorker about the genesis of the translation, and I encourage you to have a read through the interview before you head to lulu.com TO BUY ME THIS BOOK.*

Speaking of ALL CAPS, last month The Chronicle of Higher Education delved into the import of this oldest of Internet irritations. As well as the use of caps, however, Anne Curzan also discusses the changing use of punctuation — and especially how the lack of punctuation has become normal in some contexts. She notes that “Texting must compensate for the lack of physical cues we have in face-to-face conversation for determining emotional content”, and that punctuation has evolved to keep pace:

For example, “okay” is neutral, but “okay.” (with the period) is a little bit stern if not a little bit angry, and “okay…” (with ellipsis) is downright unhappy and/or skeptical.

This dovetails neatly with a recent chat I had with Ben Crair of the New Republic, in which he posited that “The Period Is Pissed”, and asked: “When did our plainest punctuation mark become so aggressive?” Perhaps I haven’t picked up on the mores of instant messaging to the required degree, but I’m not sure that I quite concur; am I hopelessly behind the times, or is the humble period now freighted with aggression?

In other news, I was happy to be able to introduce my friend Alexandra Silverman to Penny Speckter recently. Alex profiled Penny for Narratively, and she has captured her absolutely perfectly. You must read her article!

Lastly, some time ago I spoke to David Plaisant for Monocle 24’s design programme “Section D”, and the show is now available online should you want to listen. Yours truly pops up at around 17 minutes in.

Thanks for reading!

*
A tip of the hat to Holly Bik at Deep Sea News for coming across this leviathan work of emoji. ↢