Miscellany № 30

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!

1.

 

2.
Bell, J L. “Dash It All!”.

 

3.
Yasuoka, Koichi, and Motoko Yasuoka. “On the Prehistory of QWERTY”. ZINBUN 42 (March 2011): 161-174.

 

Miscellany № 29

A genuine miscellany this week; a grab-bag of punctuational ephemera to chew over at your leisure. First, I would draw your attention to Benjamin Samuel’s forensic, heart-breaking, and hilarious ode to the comma at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. I quote:

The comma can also be deployed to separate, organize, and distinguish objects in a list. Consider the list below:

You left behind your box set of Marlon Brando DVDs, ungraded papers, running shoes, and that preposterous Slap Chop you bought from the TV.

Similarly, a comma is needed for the following series of actions:

She had everything waiting on the kitchen counter (clearly she hoped to dispatch me quickly), but with a wave of my arm I knocked it all to the floor, then seized the Slap Chop, held its spring-assisted blades against my chest, and claimed I’d Slap-Chop my heart to pieces if she hadn’t already left it minced.

Next, Megan Garber of The Atlantic has followed up on Stan Carey’s recent blog post about the many-splendored names of the exclamation mark with an article entitled “‘Screamer,’ ‘Slammer,’ ‘Bang’ … and 15 Other Ways to Say ‘Exclamation Point’”. (I’ve done the decent thing and replaced primes with inverted commas.) Read both — Stan first, then Megan — to get the full effect. Having just done so, I find myself suffused with a desire to champion the Urban Dictionary’s entertaining “shout pole”.

Lastly, and most tangentially, Ben Eisen of the All Time Top Ten music podcast tweeted recently to ask the question: “what are the ten greatest songs (with parentheses in the title)?” He and David Daskal attempt to answer it here.


And let’s not forget, of course, that a certain book is now available for pre-order.

Maximal meaning in minimal space: the history of punctuation


Punctuation, as any dictionary will tell you, consists of the marks that dance around the letters of a text to mark clauses, sentences and inflection.1 What, though, is minimal punctuation? Is it in the range of marks that a writer uses? Ernest Hemingway wrote famously minimalist prose, for instance, where marks such as the semicolon (;), the ellipsis (…) and the dash (–) are notable mostly for their absence. The Old Man and the Sea contains but one colon and one exclamation mark, and is none the worse for it.2

What of punctuation marks themselves? There is a very definite scale of complexity when it comes to punctuation, ranging from ostentatious symbols such as the manicule (☞) and asterism (⁂) all the way down to the humble comma (,) and apostrophe (’). Sitting at the bottom of the scale, the full stop (.) is surely simplest of all, and yet it is possible to step beyond even its mathematical irreducibility. The most minimal mark of punctuation is not a mark at all: it is the space between words.

Writing in ancient Greece was broken by neither marks nor spaces. Lines of closely-packed letters ran left to right across the page and back again like a farmer ploughing a field.3 The sole aid to the reader was the paragraphos, a simple horizontal stroke in the margin that indicated something of interest on the corresponding line. It was up to the reader to work out what, exactly, had been highlighted in this fashion: a change of topic, perhaps; a new stanza in a poem; or a change in speaker in a drama.456

Punctuation itself – literally, the act of adding “points” to a text – did not arrive until the third century BC, when Aristophanes of the great Library at Alexandria described a series of middle (·), low (.) and high points (˙) denoting short, medium and long pauses.4 Over the centuries, this system gave rise to punctuation as we know it: from Aristophanes’ three dots came the colon, the full stop, and many other marks besides. At the same time the paragraphos evolved into the “pilcrow”, a C-shaped mark (¶) placed at the start of each new section in a text.7 The word space was a late arrival, appearing only when monks in medieval England and Ireland began splitting apart unfamiliar Latin texts to make them easier to read.

Then, in the mid-1450s, Gutenberg published his famed 42-line Bible,8 and everything changed overnight. Spaces, once as wide or as narrow as a scribe chose to make them, begat an extended family of fixed widths, from hair spaces ( ) up to em quads ( ), that printers required to justify lines. Once carefully painted in by hand, pilcrows became too time-consuming to add; left out, their ghostly absences gave rise to the indented paragraph.9

In the end, even a simple word space, paragraph or full stop carries the weight of centuries of tradition and evolution. Like Hemingway, we may prefer to leave out colons, semicolons and dashes, but as long as we do our readers the favour of spacing words, finishing sentences and breaking paragraphs, there can be no such thing as minimal punctuation.


1.
Oxford English Dictionary. “Punctuation”.

 

2.
Hemingway, Ernest, and Herman Finkelstein Collection Library of Congress. The Old Man and the Sea. Scribner, 1952.

 

3.
Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Boustrophedon (writing Style)”.

 

4.
Brown, T. Julian. “Punctuation”. Encyclopaedia Britannica.

 

5.
Pearse, Roger. “More on the Paragraphos Mark”. Roger Pearse, November 10, 2010.

 

6.
Johnson, William A. “The Function of the Paragraphus in Greek Literary Prose Texts”. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie Und Epigraphik 100 (1994): 65-68. https://doi.org/10.2307/20189008.

 

7.
Parkes, M. B. “The Development of the General Repertory of Punctuation”. In Pause and Effect: Punctuation in the West, 41-49. University of California Press, 1993.

 

8.
Davies, M., and . The Gutenberg Bible. Pomegranate Artbooks in association with The British Library, 1997.

 

9.
Tschichold, Jan, and Robert Bringhurst. “Why the Beginnings of Paragraphs Must Be Indented”. In The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design, 105-109. Lund Humphries, 1991.

 

The Shady Characters book, revealed!

Image courtesy of Jason Booher.
Image courtesy of Jason Booher.

Ladies and gentlemen: the Shady Characters book is now available for pre-order at W.W. Norton, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble and The Book Depository.

Phew. Wow, even.

After months of writing, editing and proof-reading with the help of Brendan Curry, Laurie Abkemeier, Rachelle Mandik and many others, it feels like everything has happened in a rush. The loose, printed proofs arrived in the post a couple of weeks back, closely followed by the bound proofs, and now by the appearance of the book itself at Norton, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

The bound proofs, incidentally, are a wondrous thing. The book has been set, with quite some flair, in Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ splendid Hoefler Text, and the typographic treatment is spectacular — there are certain things that don’t quite work in an electronic medium, and the physical book is just that little bit more cohesive. The pilcrow on the cover is also set in Hoefler Text, though the text is in Futura. I like it a lot, and my default sans-serif font choice of Gill Sans is under threat.

This is all still a little unreal. But not so unreal that I won’t encourage you to head over to the vendor of your choice and pre-order it as soon as you can!

Miscellany № 28: Save the Tironian et!

Readers will, of course, be familiar with the interrobang (‽), that most Madison Avenue of punctuation marks. Its name, like its shape, is equal parts question and exclamation: the Latin interrogatio, for a rhetorical question,1 combines with ‘bang’, a slang term for the exclamation mark. Until I started researching the history of the interrobang I had never come across this use of the word ‘bang’, but a quick check of the Typographic Desk Reference soon dispelled my ignorance: the TDR also lists ‘exclamation point’, ‘screamer’ and the rather risqué ‘dog’s cock’ as alternatives.2

These, it turns out, are mere drops in the ocean of exclamation point names, and a new post at Stan Carey’s Sentence First lifts the lid on the veritable cornucopia of alternative terms for this humble mark. “Bang, pling, boing, shriek, gasper, screamer, Christer! And other exclamation mark aliases” pulls in these terms and more, with some informed commentary to follow. Full disclosure: Stan kindly provided a great photograph of the Tironian et (⁊) for a prior post here, but that’s no reason not to check his his excellent blog. What’s your favoured name for the exclamation mark?


Speaking of the Tironian et, European type foundry Underware recently posted an image consisting entirely of ampersands on Flickr. I was struck by its similarity to the serried ranks of ampersands presented in Formenwandlungen der &-Zeichen,3 Jan Tschichold’s obsessive 1953 pamphlet that chronicles the character’s visual development. Tschichold also catalogued the many forms of the ampersand’s ill-fated competitor, and it seems a shame that this once-great mark is so little heard of today. Accordingly, I have begun the fightback: it is time to lobby for the reintroduction of the Tironian et. Surely Underware, as noted purveyors of quality irony marks,4 can be persuaded to help rehabilitate another endangered symbol?


In other news, today I received the first page proofs of the Shady Characters book, set in Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ luxurious Hoefler Text. It’s one of the default fonts for this blog, and it’s preinstalled on many Apple Macs: if you’re reading on such a machine then you’re likely already looking at it. If not, I encourage you to take a look at some of H&FJ’s specimens! It’s a feast for the eyes.

1.
Burton, Gideon O. “Interrogatio”. Brigham Young University, March 2011.

 

2.
Rosendorf, Theodore. “Exclamation Mark”. In The Typographic Desk Reference, 46+. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Books, 2009.

 

3.
Tschichold, Jan. Formenwandlungen Der &-Zeichen. D. Stempel AG, 1953.

 

4.