A Bank of China note for one hundred Hong Kong dollars. Is that some sort of double-decker emoticon at bottom right?
Thank you for bearing with me for the past few weeks! My wife and I got back from our honeymoon last weekend, and normal service can resume now that the jet lag has more or less dissipated.
The picture above, in case you’re wondering, was taken in a Hong Kong restaurant when I realised that a HK$100 note with which we were about to pay bore what looked almost like a double-decker emoticon at the bottom left. I snapped a photograph with my phone, we paid for our meal, and I thought no more about it until now. A quick check of Wikipedia this afternoon took me to this site, which shows both the front and back of this series of note, and the mystery was solved. What looks like :·)·) — a sort of bearded smiley — is, in fact, the number “100”, with half of each digit displayed on the front of the note and the other half on the back. Holding it up to the light would have cleared things up right away.
Thanks again for your patience, and stay tuned for Miscellany № 32 later today!
“Un maximum de sens dans un minimum d’espace: l’histoire de la ponctuation”, Hiatus, la revue, issue 1.
I was excited this week to receive a package postmarked from France: inside were two printed copies of Hiatus, la revue, the magazine for which I wrote a short article on the history of punctuation. I must say thank you to Francis Ramel at Les Éditions Hiatus for sending these over; though it was great to have the opportunity to write for Hiatus in the first place, seeing the article in print is even better.
The mock-up above shows the article in its French form, along with a “poem in a single word” on the facing page, another of the issue’s riffs on the theme of “minimum”. I don’t think I’m giving away too much when I say that the entire poem can be translated as:
I
The poem is set in Bouture, a work-in-progress typeface by Francis. If you’d like to read more of this issue of Hiatus, it’s available at the Hiatus store for an eminently reasonable €5. Also, I’ll be holding a competition in the near future for one lucky reader to win one of my copies — stay tuned for more details!
Chris Booth, Jason Black, Penny Speckter and others wrote in to mention the interrobang’s guest appearance within the hallowed pages of Randall Monroe’s consistently excellent webcomic xkcd. I’ll let Randall’s strip do the talking:
XKCD #1209: “Encoding”. (Image courtesy of Randall Monroe.)
Marc Smith, professor of palaeography at the École Nationale des Chartes, Paris, wrote in with some questions about the earliest appearance of the @-symbol on the typewriter keyboard. I’m afraid to say that I was not able to offer a great deal of help; Marc was already far better informed than I was when it came to the specifics of the dates and typewriter models involved. He’s so well informed, in fact, that in January this year he gave a 70-minute lecture on “The true story of the at sign”, which is available on YouTube. Though the lecture is in French, there are plenty of intriguing slides in there illuminating the @-symbol’s evolution and usage for non-Francophones.*
That’s all for this week, and for a few weeks to come: my wife and I will be away for our honeymoon for the next fortnight. More on that competition when we get back!
*
Sadly, though I can now validly claim to have contributed to a French magazine, my French language skills are woefully inadequate to keeping up with Professor Smith’s presentation! ↢
The main typeface this time round is (I think) Johnston, the original, iconic London Underground typeface on which Eric Gill’s Gill Sans is based. I’m awaiting definitive confirmation from my editor at Particular, but if any Shady Character readers know better, please let me know!
The main typeface this time round is (I think) Johnston, the original, iconic London Underground typeface on which Eric Gill’s Gill Sans is based. I’m awaiting definitive confirmation from my editor at Particular, but if any Shady Character readers know better, please let me know!
The typewriter has had quite an impact over the years, influencing, among other things, working practices (and gender stereotypes in the workplace), typeface designs, and punctuation usage — witness the stunted hyphen-minus that stands in for the en and em dashes on your computer keyboard, beneficiary and victims, respectively, of the “Great Typewriter Squeeze”.12 Carrying all this baggage, as it does, I was intrigued to read Jimmy Stamp’s recent article “Fact of [sic] Fiction? The Legend of the QWERTY Keyboard” over at the Smithsonian Magazine’s Design Decoded blog. Theories abound as to the origins of the QWERTY keyboard layout, and though Stamp runs through the usual suspects — it was designed to separate common letter pairings to avoid jamming, say some; it allowed Remington salesmen to type the word “typewriter” using only the top row of keys, say others — he also adds a more obscure suggestion, put forth in 2011 by researchers at Kyoto University. As Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka explain, the QWERTY keyboard layout may have more to do with Morse code than anything else:
[Morse] code represents Z as ‘· · · ·’ which is often confused with the digram SE, more frequently-used than Z. Sometimes Morse receivers in United States cannot determine whether Z or SE is applicable, especially in the first letter(s) of a word, before they receive following letters. Thus S ought to be placed near by both Z and E on the keyboard for Morse receivers to type them quickly (by the same reason C ought to be placed near by IE. But, in fact, C was more often confused with S).3
An interesting idea, and one I’ll be reading more about as soon as their paper becomes available online.
In other news, and coming slightly out of left field, Shady Characters was lucky enough to get a mention in a frenetic and enjoyable YouTube video about the history of the interrobang by graphic designer Karen Kavett. Continuing the audiovisual theme, Tusk, a Newcastle-based band from whom we’ve heard before, have just released their Interrobang EP. I’ve been listening to it non-stop for the past few days; if you’re into guitar music at all, I highly recommend that you check it out.
That’s all for now, but check back tomorrow for some book-related news!
