- Houston, Keith.
Shady Characters.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.
ISBN 978-0-393-06442-1.
-
¶ The earliest written
languages seem mostly to have been mnemonic tools for recording
and reciting spoken text. As such, they had little need for
punctuation and many managed to get along withoutevenspacesbetweenwords.
If you read it out loud, it's pretty easy to sound out (although
words written without spaces can be used to create deliciously
ambiguous text).
As the written language evolved to encompass scholarly and
sacred texts, commentaries upon other texts, fiction,
drama, and law, the structural complexity of the text grew
apace, and it became increasingly difficult to express this in
words alone. Punctuation was born.
In the third century B.C.
Aristophanes of Byzantium
(not to be confused with
the other fellow),
librarian at Alexandria,
invented a system of dots to denote logical breaks in
Greek texts of classical rhetoric, which were placed
after units called the komma, kolon,
and periodos. In a different graphical form, they are
with us still.
Until the introduction of movable type printing in Europe in the
15th century, books were hand-copied by scribes, each of whom was
free, within the constraints of their institutions, to innovate
in the presentation of the texts they copied. In the interest of
conserving rare and expensive writing materials such as papyrus and
parchment, abbreviations came into common use. The humble ampersand
(the derivation of whose English name is delightfully presented
here) dates to the shorthand invented by Cicero's personal
secretary/slave Tiro, who invented a mark to quickly write
“et” as his master
spoke.
Other punctuation marks co-evolved with textual criticism: quotation
marks allowed writers to distinguish text from other sources
included within their works, and asterisks, daggers, and other
symbols were introduced to denote commentary upon text. Once
bound books
(codices) printed
with wide margins became common, readers would annotate them as
they read, often ☛ pointing out key
passages. Even a symbol as with-it as the now-ubiquitous “@”
(which I recall around 1997 being called “the Internet logo”)
is documented as having been used in 1536 as an abbreviation for
amphorae of wine. And the ever-more-trending symbol prefixing #hashtags?
Isaac Newton used it in the 17th century, and the story of how it came
to be called an “octothorpe” is worthy of modern myth.
This is much more than a history of obscure punctuation. It traces how
we communicate in writing over the millennia, and how technologies such
as movable type printing, mechanical type composition, typewriting, phototypesetting,
and computer text composition have both enriched and impoverished our written
language. Impoverished? Indeed—I compose this on a computer able
to display in excess of 64,000 characters from the written languages used
by most people since the dawn of civilisation. And yet, thanks to the poisonous
legacy of the typewriter, only a few people seem to be aware of the distinction,
known to everybody setting type in the 19th century, among the em-dash—used
to set off a phrase; the en-dash, denoting “to” in constructions
like “1914–1918”; the hyphen, separating compound words such as
“anarcho-libertarian” or words split at the end of a line; the minus
sign, as in −4.221; and the figure dash, with the same width as numbers
in a font where all numbers have the same width, which permits setting tables
of numbers separated by dashes in even columns. People who appreciate typography
and use
TeX
are acutely aware of this and grind their teeth when reading documents
produced by demotic software tools such as Microsoft Word or reading postings
on the Web which, although they could be so much better, would have made
Mencken storm the Linotype floor of the Sunpapers had any of his writing been
so poorly set.
Pilcrows, octothorpes, interrobangs, manicules, and the centuries-long quest
for a typographical mark for irony (Like, we really need that¡)—this
is a pure typographical delight: enjoy!
In the Kindle edition end of chapter notes
are bidirectionally linked (albeit with inconsistent
and duplicate reference marks), but end notes are not linked to their
references in the text—you must manually flip to the notes
and find the number. The end notes contain many references to Web
URLs, but these are not active links, just text: to follow them you
must copy and paste them into a browser address bar. The index is just
a list of terms, not linked to references in the text. There is no
way to distinguish examples of typographic symbols which are set in
red type from chapter note reference links set in an identical red
font.
October 2013 