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Shady Characters
The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols
Other Typographical Marks
Keith Houston
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York
•
London
2
For Leigh
3
Contents
PREFACE
HOW TO READ THIS BOOK
1
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2
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3
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4
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5
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6
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7
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8
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9
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10
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11
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THE PILCROW
THE INTERROBANG
THE OCTOTHORPE
THE AMPERSAND
THE @ SYMBOL
THE ASTERISK AND DAGGER
THE HYPHEN
THE DASH
THE MANICULE
QUOTATION MARKS
IRONY AND SARCASM
1.Irony in History
2.Ironics
3.Digital Sarcasm
AFTERWORD
FURTHER READING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
4
Preface
Some years ago a friend recommended a book to me. The book was
An
Essay on Typography,
written in 1931 by Eric Gill, one of England’s most
famous modern typographers.1 Although it was both diminutive in size and
short on actual instruction (Gill preferred polemic to practical advice),
Essay
was a joy to read, full of philosophical asides and painstakingly hand-cut
illustrations. Most of all, though, my interest was piqued by a character
resembling a reversed capital
P
that peppered the text at inscrutable
intervals. What was this
for? Why did it appear at the start of each
paragraph, and between some sentences but not others?
I hunted down the symbol in my copy of the
Typographic Desk
Reference,
though its perfunctory definition was less than satisfying. As it
explained, this character was called the pilcrow and once upon a time it had
been used to separate paragraphs:
pilcrow
An old mark, rarely in use today, representing the beginning of a
paragraph or section. Today it is used as an invisible character in word
processing applications to represent a paragraph break. Also called
blind P, reverse P
or
paragraph mark.
2
This curt description invited more questions than it answered. I started to
notice the same mark in other places: websites, glossaries of other
typographic reference works, and even computer applications such as
Microsoft Word.
How did the pilcrow’s curious reverse-P form come about? Was it
related to the letter P, as the TDR seemed to suggest, or was it something
more subtle? What were the roots of its pithy, half-familiar name? What
had caused this “old mark” to fall out of use, and having done just that, why
did Eric Gill see fit to place it seemingly at random in his only published
work on typography?
What, in other words, was the pilcrow all about?
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