Miscellany № 33: the controversial hyphen

The hyphen, it seems, divides just as much as it connects. This week we take a look at two stories of hyphenation — both literal and metaphorical — gone wrong.

Subscribers to The Times may have come across a June 22nd article by Rose Wild entitled “Rude hyphens are not the work of saboteurs”. Wild’s article promises much to the punctuation-phile:

About seven years ago the style editor of The Times assured readers that those old favourites, the Arse- nal, mans- laughter and the- rapist, were about to disappear from our pages. Thanks to some smart work on the IT front, a hyphenation dictionary embedded in the system would henceforth impose immaculate logic on the splitting of words, when such a thing was needed.

Sadly, Rupert Murdoch’s paywall prevents me from learning more about these scandalous bithorpes and their alleged reappearance in The Times’ tablet edition. Have Shady Characters readers come across these (or any other) failures of automatic hyphenation? Leave your stories in the comments below!<

Also on the hyphen front, Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent visit to India came close to derailment at the hands of an implied hyphen. As The Telegraph of Calcutta reports, prior to the presidency of George W. Bush, US policy towards India “was known as ‘hyphenation’: everything to do with India was India-Pakistan, like Af-Pak, denoting Afghanistan-Pakistan, not a standalone relationship with either country.”

George W. Bush (and subsequently Hilary Clinton) instead pursued separate, bilateral relationships with India and Pakistan, but the perception within Indian diplomatic circles was that with Kerry’s arrival, the maligned hyphen was back in the ascendant. The Telegraph concludes that Kerry has averted disaster by forgoing a scheduled meeting in Islamabad, Pakistan, which begs the question: is this the first time that a mark of punctuation has influenced international politics?

Lastly, don’t forget the Shady Characters competition! To enter to win a copy of Hiatus № 1, featuring an article by yours truly, just comment on this post or reply to, retweet or favourite this tweet. Good luck!

Update: …and the competition is closed. Thanks to everyone who entered! I’ll announce the winner in a special blog post tomorrow.

A Shady Characters competition: win a copy of Hiatus № 1!

As mentioned here recently, a few months ago an article of mine was translated into French and featured in issue 1 of Hiatus, an occasional magazine published by Francis Ramel and his colleagues at Les Éditions Hiatus. (A mock-up of the article is shown below, and you can read the original English version here.)

"Un maximum de sens dans un minimum d'espace: l'histoire de la ponctuation", Hiatus, la revue, issue 1.
“Un maximum de sens dans un minimum d’espace: l’histoire de la ponctuation”, Hiatus, la revue, issue 1.

As a way of saying thank you to all of the readers who have contributed to Shady Characters over the past few years, I’m going to give away a pristine copy of Hiatus № 1 to one lucky follower. To enter, either:

  • leave a comment on this post, making sure to supply a valid email address so that I can contact you in the event that you win, or
  • reply to, retweet, or mark as favourite the tweet announcing this contest, making sure to follow @shadychars so that I can send you a direct message in the event that you win. (Please don’t create multiple accounts or repeatedly reply to the message — Twitter may ban you as a result. One reply is fine!)

I’ll add all unique commenters and tweeters together in two weeks’ time and pick one at random as the winner — the contest will close at noon GMT on Saturday 6th July, so get your entry in before then. And not to worry: if you don’t win this competition, there’ll more along in due course. Good luck!

Update: …and the competition is closed. Thanks to everyone who entered! I’ll announce the winner in a special blog post tomorrow.

Miscellany № 32

Some housekeeping this week, with lots of links from the past few weeks to get through. As always, if you have something you’d like to see featured here, please drop me a line with the details.

Just before my honeymoon, I was lucky enough to be interviewed for an article in Fast Company’s Co.Design blog. John Brownlee’s article, The Unlikely Evolution Of The @ Symbol, focusing on the symbol’s use as a signifier of digital identity, is now online. Thanks are in order for John for selecting the most coherent parts of my answers!

I’ve been following Smithsonian Magazine’s Design Decoded blog for some time now, and I read with interest Jimmy Stamp’s post there about The Evolution of the Treble Clef. The development of the mark echoes the journey of many a shady character, and it’s interesting to see the same evolutionary mechanisms at work in a different context.

You may remember that back in May I made reference to an academic paper that purported to have divined the rationale behind the organisation of the QWERTY keyboard. The precise algorithm with which Christopher Latham Sholes created the enduring layout of the typewriter keyboard has never been satisfactorily explained, but Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka’s “On the Prehistory of QWERTY” makes a game stab at doing just that. Now available online, there’s lots of detail in there I wish I’d known about while writing Shady Characters!

Lastly, I bring you a link forwarded to me by my esteemed editor at W. W. Norton, Brendan Curry. He writes only: “You will enjoy this, I think!”, and he is correct. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the awful majesty of the spampersand.

Back in business

$100 HKD - is that an emoticon?
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!

Miscellany № 31: Hiatus, and a hiatus

"Un maximum de sens dans un minimum d'espace: l'histoire de la ponctuation", Hiatus, la revue, issue 1.
“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.)
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! ↢