Miscellany № 43: sartalics \live\!

It’s a sad fact of life in this business (that is, the business of unusual punctuation marks) that many a promising mark has gone the way of the dodo. The SarcMark©, for instance, was a veritable punctuational mayfly; Paul Mathis’ attempt to rebrand ‘the’ as ‘Ћ’ was over almost as soon as it had begun; and so on, and so forth. The archives of this blog are littered with the corpses of failed innovations.

It is with some satisfaction, then, that I can now report that “Sartalics”, the digital reinterpretation of Tom Driberg’s “ironics”, or backwards-slanting italics, has recently been resuscitated. Nathan Hoang, one of the three advertising interns who launched sartalics.com back in 2011 (the others being June Kim and Blake Gilmore), has recently brought the long-dormant @Sartalics Twitter account back to life.

Rather than focusing on introducing an entirely new style of font, however, this time round Nathan is concentrating on the use of backslashes as a signal of ironic intent. I think this is actually a rather neat idea; the use of asterisks to imply bold or emphasised text is as old as the hills in Internet terms, and employing backslashes to convey \irony\ or \sarcasm\ is a very short leap from there. No fiddling with Unicode characters or font editors — textual sarcasm is right there at your fingertips. Clearly, though, sartalics in any form have a long way to go before they can claim to be in common use. As Nathan says himself,

Slow clap for #Sartalics. \A lot of progress\ since 2011.

What do you think? Is there a future for this most \useful\ of textual innovations?

As I research material for The Book I find myself subscribing to a whole new set of book- and manuscript-related blogs. Recently, at Jesse Hurlbut’s Manuscript Art blog, and apropos of nothing much at all, I came across this lovely decorative paragraph mark, or pilcrow. If you’re interested in seeing more, I highly recommend following Jesse’s blog.

In other news, Mark Libermann of UPenn’s Language Log blog brings to our attention the scandalous news that “EU rules ‘mean children can’t get life-saving cancer drugs’”; and, lastly, the ampersand inspires a poem at Magma Poetry.

Thanks for reading!

Mea culpa

Like many books, a few errors slipped through the net as I wrote Shady Characters and evaded even the practised gaze of Brendan Curry, my editor at W. W. Norton, and of Rachelle Mandik, our excellent copy-editor. Unlike some books, however, I’ve been lucky enough to have a cadre of eagle-eyed readers to pick up and help correct those mistakes. Without further ado, then, I give you the first instalment of Shady Characters’ errata. There will be more to come, I’m sure, as more editions are published (speaking of which, keep an eye out for the American paperback later this year!), but for now I must thank Mark Forsyth, Eric Johnson, Zoran Minderovic, Bill Pollack, Patrick Reagh, Jeff Shay, and Liz B. Veronis for helping point out and fix these errors.

As always, please don’t hesitate to get in touch or leave a comment below if you come across an error in any edition or format of Shady Characters. I’d appreciate it very much, and I’d be very happy to acknowledge you in future editions!

Calling all book groups

Last Friday, quite unexpectedly, I found myself chatting to a book group in NYC. Kristina Jelinek had mentioned on Twitter that she was reading Shady Characters for her book group at work; I offered to join in too, if they’d like to have me, and so I spent an absorbing forty-five minutes answering questions over Google Chat. (I’m Skype-literate too, I promise, but our Internet connection was uncooperative.) This coming Tuesday I’ll be at the Bonanza! book group at the Blue Blazer here in Edinburgh, and now that my appetite has been whetted I can’t wait.

So, to any and all book groups: if you’re reading, have read, or are planning to read Shady Characters, I would love to join your discussion! It’s great for me to have the chance to meet to the people who pay Shady Characters’ bills, so to speak, and perhaps I can return the favour by answering some of your questions about the book and the stories behind it. I can participate via Google or Facebook chat; on Twitter or Google+; on Skype or Google Hangouts; and everything in between. Drop me a line via the Contact page, or find me on Facebook, Twitter or Google+, and let’s get planning!

As a bonus, here are Vulture’s “5 Best Punctuation Marks in Literature”. My favourite is the first period in Moby Dick: “Call me Ishmael.” (Call me predictable.) What about you?

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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