Shady characters
In Shady Characters, Keith Houston weaves a fascinating trail through the nooks and crannies of typographical history, from the Library of Alexandria to the halls of Bell Labs. Whether investigating the annotating duo of asterisk (\) and dagger (†); the plucky pilcrow (¶) and humble ampersand (&); or the at sign (@) and octothorpe (\#), both newly reinvigorated by the Internet, *Shady Characters will delight all who cherish the unpredictable and surprising in the writing life.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
7mentions
6people
2015–2023years
71% recommend29% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > Is this symbol also fascinating to you ! How about this one . or this one ?
Yes, they've got interesting histories, and, for example, Shady characters (https://wwnorton.com/books/shady-characters/) has some fascinating things to say about them.
- This is also considered in Keith Houston's entertaining book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks.
It traces the history of some other common symbols such as the at sign and asterisk.
- Might I also recommend Keith Houston's wonderful book "Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks":
https://shadycharacters.co.uk/books/shady-characters-the-boo...
He also posts, with some regularity, to his blog on the same topic:
https://shadycharacters.co.uk/
Employing the correct usage of hyphens, en dashes and em dashes continues to be a small daily joy for me.
- This appears to be a lightly summarised excerpt of Houston's (fascinating) book "Shady Characters". As mentioned briefly at the end of the article, he has an interesting blog where he discusses more: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk .
- Although it does not have a chapter on the semicolon, check out the book "Shady Characters".
- From the book “Shady Characters” by Keith Houston
"Among Tiro’s notae was an innocuous character representing the Latin word et, or “and.” Though this was only one symbol among many (in their most elaborate medieval form, a system descended from Tiro’s original cipher comprised some fourteen thousand glyphs), the utility of Tiro’s system ensured that his et sign would considerably outlive both its creator and its sponsor. This was not, however, the storied ampersand: when Tiro created his so-called Tironian et, the ampersand was still more than a century away."
The book itself is worth a read for all the other punctuation marks it discusses.
