The Shady Characters manuscript is on the very cusp of completion, but eagle-eyed copy-editor Rachelle Mandik has noticed that I have inadvertently left a Latin book title untranslated in the chapter concerning the manicule (☞). The title is as follows:
Repetitio capituli: Omnis utriusque sexus; De poenitentiis et remissionibus1
which Google Translate helpfully mangles as:
The repetition of the chapter: Every persons of both sexes; Concerning the repentance and remission of
I am, unfortunately, ignorant of Latin, and this is likely as accurate a translation as I would be able to come up with myself. As such, I would be very, very grateful if any learned Shady Characters readers could weigh in with their own translations.
For context, the book was published in Memmingen in Germany in 1490, and it appears to be a Christian text. It is printed rather than written by hand, as can be seen in this scanned copy belonging to the Technische Universität Darmstadt. Can you provide a more accurate rendering of the title? If so, I would of course make sure to acknowledge you in the printed book!
Update: We have a pair of winners! Readers AB and John Cowan have together come up with what sounds like a very convincing translation of the problematic book title:
Lecture on the canon “Omnis utriusque sexus”; On [the Sacrament of] Penance and the remission [of sins]
You can read their reasoning below. Thanks again to all who commented! Shady Characters is lucky indeed to have such knowledgeable readers.
France is famously protective of its language. Its latest bête noire is the hashtag, Twitter’s word for the combination of an octothorpe, or hash, and a term of interest, like this: #octothorpe. Only a scant few months after the New York Times wrote in praise of the hashtag, this innocuous neologism now finds itself officially denounced by the Orwellian-sounding Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologie (CGTN). As The Local wrote recently,
One of the [CGTN]’s roles is ‘to encourage the presence of the French language on social media networks’ […] Defined as a “series of characters preceded by the # symbol”, the word ‘mot-dièse’, literally meaning ‘sharp word’, will now be used in all official documents.1
In French at least, the hashtag is no more: make way for the officially sanctioned mot-dièse, or ‘sharp word’.2
I was ready to dismiss this as a rather tone-deaf pronouncement, a knee-jerk reaction by France’s notorious language police, but there was something familiar about the term dièse. It sounded, in fact, very much like ‘diesis’, the English term for the double dagger symbol (‡) often used as a tertiary footnote marker after the asterisk (*) and dagger (†). Looking back through my notes for the Shady Characters book, I found that ‘diesis’ was formerly used to mean a musical sharp sign, or ‘♯’, while contemporary French continues to use the related term dièse for that same mark.3 And even more to the point, as Shady Characters’ sharp-eyed commenters explain below, dièse is also the French term for the hash sign.
Thus, the CGTN’s excommunication of the term ‘hashtag’ may not be so sinister after all: rather than inventing some entirely new term, France’s language authorities have simply chosen to elevate the common-or-garden hashtag to the same status as its refined, cultured doppelgänger, the sharp sign. From now on, I will picture French hashtags as the melodic counterparts of their English versions: ‘♯octothorpe’ is just that bit prettier than ‘#octothorpe’, is it not?
A short entry today, I’m afraid. I’m in the middle of responding to the copy-edited Shady Characters manuscript (you’ll be glad to hear that there are relatively few punctuation-related corrections), so things will have to be necessarily brief!
A couple of weeks ago, Rudi Seitz wrote to let me know that the Shady Characters comment form was broken. He was right; it was, but it is no longer. Please take a moment to test it out, and let me know via the Contact page if you have any problems. More interesting than my technical tribulations, however, was the rest of Rudi’s email, in which he explained:
On another note, I’ve just today undertaken my own series of experiments with the sarcasm mark, unfortunately ending in frustration: http://rudiseitz.com/2013/01/02/irony-mark/
As an avowed interrobang booster, I might have to lean in the direction of “yes”; I suspect that Martin K. Speckter’s mark already fills that niche. Even so, Rudi’s experiments in punctuation are a bracing reminder that the technological constraints that stymied many early attempts at creating new marks have now all but disappeared: we can design, disseminate and discuss new marks in a way unthinkable only a few decades ago. It begs the question: where are all the new marks of punctuation?
I must say thanks to Rudi for his email, and do hop over to his site for more on punctuation, music, photography, and a host of other topics.
Cover artwork for Tusk’s Interrobang EP. (Image courtesy of Tusk.)
As promised in a previous post, I got in touch with Tusk, a Newcastle band about to release a new EP entitled Interrobang, to ask about their choice of name. Tusk bassist Andy Cutts wrote back to explain:
We think it’s a underused and underrated piece of interesting punctuation and is due a comeback. We like how it asks a question with exclamation – we’d like to think the music will do similar.
So there you are! Thanks to Andy for fielding my questions.
Two Americana interrobangs – likely bold or extra bold, and at a large size for display purposes – gifted by Penny Speckter. Background is the cover of Agent, Action, and Reason.* (Shoddy photography by the author.)
As mentioned previously, a couple of months ago my fiancée and I visited New York City. Not only had I never visited the city, but I was also eager to meet some of the people who have been involved, in one way or another, with the Shady Characters book.
The day after we arrived I had lunch with Brendan Curry, my editor, at a restaurant round the corner from W. W. Norton’s Fifth Avenue offices. It was great to meet him in person, and after learning a little more about those parts of the publishing process still to come, I’m more excited than ever about seeing the book in print. (Sadly, my imagined three-Martini lunch1 did not come to pass. Perhaps I should move into fiction.) Laurie, my agent, was unable to meet us – for now she remains but a voice on Skype and a reliably canny email correspondent – but later in the week we did manage to organise a meeting with a third and most vital contributor to the book: Penny Speckter. Penny is, of course, the widow of interrobang inventor Martin Speckter; we’ve been corresponding since I first started looking into unusual marks of punctuation back in 2009, and she has been a great source of help and encouragement. After a few emails to confirm arrangements we met at her apartment for drinks and then dinner at an Italian restaurant a short walk away.
I was a little anxious at the prospect of meeting someone with whom I had only ever communicated via email, but I needn’t have worried. It was a fantastic evening!
Penny’s living room was lined with shelves bearing books on printing, with tiny hand presses arrayed among them.† After a slightly surreal introduction (“Hello! I’m Keith, from the Internet”) we proceeded to chat for hours – so long, in fact, that we were late for dinner by a full hour. The miniature hand presses, Penny explained, came from Martin’s collection of printing presses; for years the Speckters had rented out the apartment opposite their own to house this collection of printing paraphernalia, naming it “the Bodoni apartment” in honour of the Italian Renaissance printer. Though I had read about this in a 2012 interview,2 what I hadn’t known was that the Speckters had once emplaced a mighty Columbian press there,3 its ton-and-a-half bulk placed carefully across beams in the floor, and had played host to a number of luminaries of twentieth century printing such as Hermann Zapf4 – Hermann Zapf! – and Steve Saxe.5
Penny insists that the secret to her longevity is a Scotch and soda every evening, but I suspect it’s more likely to be her sheer, irrepressible force of personality. She has travelled widely (her first two trips abroad were to China and Nepal respectively), and at 93 she is the secretary of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen,6 a venerable New York institution that trains, supports and promotes the interests of skilled technical workers. Though she grumbled about the challenges of helping run the Society, she clearly has an enormous sense of civic duty and an enthusiasm for carrying it out.
We eventually made it to the restaurant, where we ate well and were turfed out gently as they closed for the night. Penny wouldn’t let us leave without some keepsakes, and we came away with a slip-cased copy of Martin’s book Disquisition on the Composing Stick7 and, to my continuing astonishment, a pair of the original interrobang sorts first cast for American Type Founders in 1967.‡ Though I’ve been writing about the interrobang for years, until that moment it had remained a sort of conceptual artefact, a grand idea never quite given form. And yet there in my hand was the evidence that Martin K. Speckter had somehow willed a new character into physical being – perhaps the last one we’re likely to see in this post-letterpress era. It was quite a revelation.
We thanked Penny profusely and walked the ten blocks or so back to the hotel. I can’t wait to visit again.
I mentioned Agent, Action, and Reasononce before on Shady Characters; sadly, having received it in the mail, I discover that it bears no information about its cover designer. ↢
Mental Floss recently published a primer on the many and varied uses of the em (—) and en dashes (–), including a mention of my personal favourite, the “compound adjective hyphen”. This is the case where a compound term such as “Pulitzer Prize” is joined to another term not with a hyphen but instead an assertive en dash to yield, for instance, “Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist”. And if your interest is piqued by Mental Floss’s brief treatment of the usage of the dash, then hopefully the chapter on its history in the upcoming Shady Characters book will be worth waiting for!
Moving away from punctuation for a moment, I very much enjoyed Ralf Hermann’s article on “Typographic Myth Busting: What’s a Ligature, Anyway?”. Ligatures – simply put, two or more letters rendered as a single combined character, though Ralf can educate you further on the finer points of the definition – are one of those typographic flourishes that bring the page to life, and yet are often so subtle as to be virtually undetectable. Ralf also delves into the tricky history of the peculiarly German long s–short s ligature (ſs), or eszett (ß). It’s a beautiful and enlightening article.
The interrobang continues to crop up in unexpected cases, if in name only: Tusk, a band from Newcastle, are planning to release an EP entitled Interrobang early next year. As you might expect, I have already asked them how they got the idea, and I await their answer with bated breath.
Lastly, Gawker reports on a quite magnificent attempt to reform political language in the USA. Max Read writes that a petition to “replace the period symbol with the cool sunglasses emoticon to foster a much chiller discourse in the United States” gained all of nine signatures before being removed by White House moderators.
The “cool sunglasses emoticon”, lest we forget, looks like this: 😎; I, for one, cannot see why this noble effort had to be so cruelly hushed up by The Man.
With that, it’s time for me to sign off for the year. Thank you all for continuing to read and comment – without you, there would be no Shady Characters book or blog! – and I hope you’ll keep coming back for more. Enjoy the holidays, have a great Hogmanay, and Shady Characters will be back in the New Year!
