Miscellany № 25: An Octothorpe Follow-up

Back in The Octothorpe, part 1 of 2, I quoted typographic guru Robert Bringhurst’s claim as to the cartographic origins of the ‘#’ sign:

In cartography, it is a traditional symbol for village: eight fields around a central square. That is the source of its name. Octothorp means eight fields.1

It’s certainly a charming idea, and the neatly coincidental dictionary definition of ‘thorpe’ as “[in place names] a village or hamlet”2 does nothing to contradict it. In the end, though, I could find no other sources in agreement with Bringhurst’s suggestion, while stacked against it were two first-person accounts of the very birth of the word ‘octothorpe’ — and both of them explicitly contradicted him.34 As far as I was concerned, the ‘#’ symbol was the coelacanth descendant of ‘lb’ and ‘℔’, and the word ‘octothorpe’ a joke coined at Bell Labs; neither the symbol nor its name was cartographic in any way.

Then, a few weeks ago, when I was rather occupied with other matters, reader Bertil left an intriguing comment on that same post, writing:

The # is used a cartographic symbol in Sweden (at least) for sawmills, or more precisely, as a symbol for the part of the mill where the planks are stored for air-drying.

That is quite the statement.

Bertil also posted a map key on which the ‘#’ (or at least a slightly more rectilinear version of it) appeared as a symbol for the term brädgård. My Swedish is as non-existent as my Latin, but with the aid of Google Translate I read through Swedish Wikipedia’s entries on brädgård, or ‘lumber yard’, and also nummertecken, or ‘number symbol’.

Lo and behold: in Sweden, ‘#’ is indeed a cartographic symbol, a symbolic representation of a lumber yard by way of the stacked levels of timber to be found there. Not only that, but in Swedish the symbol is also known by the slang terms brädgård — lumber yard — and vedstapel, or ‘woodpile’, a pleasing pair of monikers to be added to the symbol’s many English names. It may not be Robert Bringhurst’s “eight fields around a central square”, but I’m happy to find that the hash symbol does have a cartographic link after all. Many thanks to Bertil for his comments!

There is a welter of other punctuation-related stories to be covered this week. First up, John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes about the rise of the asterisk as a substitute for bold or italic text on the web. Though not strictly punctuation, the asterisk was created at the ancient Library at Alexandria,5 that same punctuation factory that gave rise to Aristophanes’ three-dot system in the third century BC,6 and yet it remains relevant even today. An impressive innings.

Next up are two quite different attempts to coin new marks of punctuation. Rob Walker, writing at Design Observer, recounts a conversation with his wife, the photographer Ellen Susan, in which she proposed a new mark of punctuation. Her brainchild is the “ElRey mark”, a sort of double-ended exclamation mark intended to convey exactly half the normal level of import. The name, Walker writes,

[…] refers to the name of our former dog, a highly dignified chow who was a master at communicating feeling with graceful understatement. Using the Spanish words for “the king” also suggests that an ElRey connotes comfortable mastery of protocol and politesse, intertwined with a steadfast refusal to raise one’s voice unless something is on fire.

I encourage you to read the full article; I remain unconvinced by the ElRey mark, but nevertheless it’s nice to see a semi-serious attempt to push punctuation forward.

Following closely on the heels of Walker & Susan’s demure ElRey mark is a rather more boisterous bevy of new punctuation. The title of Mike Trapp’s bold article for College Humor, “8 New Punctuation Marks We Desperately Need”, is itself in need of at least one irony mark, but his collection of manufactured marks are gloriously uninhibited. My favourites are the “andorpersand”, an enhanced ampersand that stands in for “and/or”, and the “Morgan Freemark”, which, Trapp writes, “reminds readers that they can read words in any voice they want, so maybe they should read these words in Morgan Freeman’s voice”. A powerful message.

The symbols are available for download in TTF format, and you should probably thank your lucky stars that they’re not yet available as a web font.

That’s all for now. Thanks for bearing with me during the past few weeks!

1.
Bringhurst, Robert. “Octothorpe”. In The Elements of Typographic Style : Version 3.2, 314+. Hartley and Marks, Publishers, 2008.

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2.
“Thorp”. Oxford University Press, May 2011.

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3.
Kerr, Douglas A. “The ASCII Character ‘Octatherp’”. Douglas A Kerr, May 7, 2006.

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4.
Carlsen, Ralph. “What the ####?”. Edited by Andrew Emmerson. Telecoms Heritage Journal, no. 28 (1996): 52-53.

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5.
Pfeiffer, Rudolf. “Aristarchus: The Art of Interpretation”. In History of Classical Scholarship from the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age, 210-233. Clarendon, 1968.

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6.
Kemp, J Alan. “The Tekhne Grammatike of Dionysius Thrax: Translated into English”. Historiographia Linguistica 13, no. 2/3 (1986): 343-363.

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Do you know Latin?

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.

1.
Unknown entry ↢

Miscellany № 24: Sharp Words

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?

1.
McPartland, Ben. “France Bins Twitter’s ’hashtag’ for Gallic Word”. Stockholm: The Local Europe AB, January 2013.

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2.
Terminologie et de Néologie, Commission Générale de. “Mot-dièse”. Legifrance.gouv.fr, January 2013.

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3.
OED Online. “Diesis”.

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Miscellany № 23

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/

Also, I have a proposal for distinguishing ironic questions from ironic statements by giving them separate marks:
http://rudiseitz.com/2013/01/02/punctuating-ironic-questions/

Have I reinvented the wheel here?

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.)
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.