I came across a post last July on Emojipedia, in which Keith Broni noted that Twitter, or X, had redesigned its PISTOL emoji. PISTOL had always been controversial: most online platforms started off with PISTOLs drawn as realistic firearms, but, over the course of the mid-2010s, most of them moved to toylike renderings of water pistols instead. Twitter had followed suit.
There is something interesting happening with blogging. For a long time, blogs like this one were the way to opine, to share, to bloviate. Then social media came along and stole blogging’s thunder, with the average blogger gravitating towards long threads on Twitter (RIP; † ⚰; 💀; etc., etc.) or photo-heavy Instagram posts. Next came newsletters — blogs delivered by email, essentially — which finally broke the social media hegemony.
Hello, and welcome to 2025. Is it that time already?
The possessive apostrophe (or rather, the abuse of the possessive apostrophe) is a recurrent guest star here at Shady Characters, but usually in the English language. Recently, though, the Guardian reported that unneeded apostrophes are infecting German, too. The so-called Deppenapostroph, or “idiot’s apostrophe”, appears when a German-language expression uses it to indicate a possessive — despite the fact that it is more correct to add an “s” on its own rather than “’s”.
Having dispatched punctuation and book news, we’re on to pocket calculators! Incredibly, half a century or more after their appearance, there is still news to be had on the subject.
In the introduction to Empire of the Sum, I mention that like some other animals, ravens and other corvids are known to be able to count. Not only that, but they understand the concept of zero, which is something that humans struggled with for quite some time.1 Now, though, a study in Science shows that not only can crows count, they can count out loud. In the words of the paper’s authors,
In the second of this miniseries of post-deadline catch-ups (the first dealt with punctuation), I’ve collected some links on the subject of books.
First is a recent exhibition at Harvard’s Houghton Library, called “Marks in Books”, that has, sadly, run its course. But John Overholt, a curator of early books and manuscripts at Houghton, writes to say that the exhibit was adapted from a 1984 exhibition on the same subject and that the catalogue of that earlier incarnation is available online.