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Miscellany № 40: Emoji Dick and the ANGRY Full Stop

December 1, 2013

With Winterval approaching, and bearing in mind the concomitant need to find gifts for our nearest and dearest, may I present a gift that I would dearly love to receive: Emoji Dick; or 🐳. This is, as editor Fred Benenson explains, “a crowd sourced and crowd funded translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into Japanese emoticons called emoji”; Shady Characters readers will be well aware of the general concept of emoticons, of course, and emoji are effectively an expanded set of such symbols composed of graphical images rather than typographic marks.

Maximal meaning in minimal space: the history of punctuation

The following article, translated into French, was originally published in the April 2013 issue of Hiatus, la revue. Francis Ramel, Hiatus’ editor-in-chief, contacted me some time back to ask if I might be interested in writing an article about the “minimum” of punctuation, to match one of the themes of the April issue. The word count was suitably minimal — only 3,000 characters, or around 500 words — so I did my best to compress some of the subjects familiar to Shady Characters readers into a short article on the subject. Francis arranged for the article to be translated into French for the magazine, but it seemed a shame to leave the English version unpublished. I hope you enjoy reading this little diversion from Shady Characters’ day-to-day business as much as I did writing it!