!?$%*#@!!

I’ve always liked punctuation; some would say I like it a little too much. For my junior-college newspaper, I wrote an opinion column called something melodramatic and “clever” like “The Outspeaker.” […checking yearbook… yeah, that was it, all right] I was convinced that the only thing anyone would notice about the column was the eloquence and subtlety with which I wrote. So I was quite surprised and confused, then, when my journalism instructor and newspaper advisor presented me with a bogus certificate, awarding me a prize for “parentheses, colons, and dashes.”

As you may know, tomorrow, 2008-09-24 is National Punctuation Day in the US. It seemed a good day to trot out some typographical trivia.

First up is a recent Beetle Bailey cartoon. The Sarge character’s cussing is the one most often cited as an example of cartoon swearing, and rightly so: his creator, Mort Walker, actually invented the name for those swirlies, stars and asterisks, exclamation points, miniature Saturns (the planet, not the car), and so on. The name? Grawlixes.

(Walker also named other comic-strip devices to communicate meaning, like plewds for the little droplets of sweat flying off a character’s head, indicating stress, and solrads for the mostly diagonal lines radiating out from a light source, such as the sun or a lightbulb. Solrads look similar to emanata, except that at the center of emanat is a creature’s head; emanata indicate that the creature, most often human, is shocked or surprised.)

You may know already about the so-called interrobang. This was invented by an advertising guy in the 1960s, who didn’t like having to punctuate alarmed or disbelieving questions with both a question mark and an exclamation point. (Can you believe the guy’s naivete?!) What you may not know is that you can insert it into a Web page, like a browser post. Go to the HTML view (this doesn’t work if you’re working with a what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface), and at the point where you want the interrobang to appear, insert the characters “‽” (no quotes, but be sure to include the &# and the semi-colon). The one at the right was created that way; it’s not an image, just a plain old character displayed in a large font.

Some of my favorite bits of typographic trivia comes from a time, years back, when I was thinking about doing an article on the history of punctuation.

What first triggered the idea for the never-written article was a book, A B C Et Cetera, by Alexander and Nicholas Humez. Its subtitle, “The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet,” pretty much sums it up: each chapter is devoted to one or more letters of that alphabet. (I and J are lumped together, as are U, V, and W, and X, Y, and Z. Each other letter gets its own chapter.)

One of the longest chapters in the book is given over to the letter Q — one of the most important, because of the Latin/Roman predilection for words starting with or containing the letters qu in combination. Also contributing to the chapter’s length, though, is a digressive path which the brothers Humez wander down, starting with the word quaestio — Latin for (surprise!) question.

Why is this word important?

Take its first and last letters, and stack them one atop the other:

Q
o

Oh, heck, while you’re at it why not exaggerate the first:

Q
o

See where this is going? Right: our (relatively modern) punctuation mark, ?, came from the (stylized) first and last letters of the word QUAESTIO. Likewise, when the Romans became especially excited about something — say, the arrival of the annual holiday they called the Saturnalia, they’d greet one another with the expression, “Io Saturnalia!” The Io was a general-purpose exclamatory, along the lines (as the Humez boys say) of our latter-day “Hey!” And stacking it, as with QUAESTIO‘s first and last letters, gives you:

I
o

(Look familiar? Ding ding ding!)

The Humezes rattle on entertainingly for several more pages, covering not only all the old standards — periods, dashes (separately, and vs. hyphens, and broken down into en dashes, em dashes, and two- and even three-em dashes), parentheses, a little of the history of the space between words as one of the earliest punctuation marks — but also getting into some exotica. The interrobang is there, briefly, as are grawlixes (which appear in what they call maledicta balloons, as opposed to simple speech balloons). And they address other punctuation marks proposed from time to time, such as:

• The crescendo mark: a diagonal (bottom left to upper right) chain of increasingly larger circles, looking sort of like rising and expanding bubbles, to appear at the end of expressions like “And awaaay we GOOOO”
• The delta-sarc: a triangle, like the Greek capital delta (?), with a horizontal line bisecting it, as might be used to terminate sentences like, “Yeah, and he cried all the way to the bank”
• The deflation point: an upside-down exclamation point (¡), which could be tacked on at the end of passages such as, “Ah, a jar of your calf’s-foot jelly, Aunt Mable. How nice”

(Going back to the ! = “Io” example, I like that with the deflation point, you might consider it to say, with something like resignation, “Oi…”)

A B C Et Cetera was first published in 1985, prior to the whole online emoticon explosion — which effectively has killed the introduction of new punctuation marks by enlisting multiple regular characters as parts of a whole, like “>:|” to communicate something like “Don’t come near me, you bastard.”

If you’d like to see some of the Humezes’ book for yourself, you can find it in searchable “preview” form on Google Books.

Finally, I direct your attention to Halfbakery, described on its About page thusly:

The Halfbakery is a communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users. It was created by people who like to speculate, both as a form of satire and as a form of creative expression.

Back in 2003, one such invention (from member phundug) was described as follows:

I propose that a Standardized Curse Symbolism (SCS) be developed; in which it is dictated that (I can’t list the English translations here without damaging the family appropriateness of this site), e.g.
#!@ means _______
%$^ means _______
%$# means _______
etc.

There would also be a lot of “null” strings, so that you could safely extend a small expletive into a row of at least 6 or 7 punctuation marks without making the language any more filthy than it already was.

to which one commenter replied:

If you’re going to curse, curse. None of this $#!^ shit.

Ha!

Bonus (non-family-appropriate): Phil Selby, of The Rut, offers the following cartoon (title: “This cartoon wrote a sweary word on your toilet wall”), depicting a character in the throes of rebellion against the whole ugly grawlix trend (click the image to see the original, including its caption):