![\"Sarge](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/grawlixes.gif?resize=500%2C150&ssl=1\" "\\"Sarge")
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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]<\/em> 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.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n First up is a recent Beetle Bailey<\/em> 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<\/em>.<\/p>\n (Walker also named other comic-strip devices to communicate meaning, like plewds<\/em> for the little droplets of sweat flying off a character’s head, indicating stress, and solrads<\/em> for the mostly diagonal lines radiating out from a light source, such as the sun or a lightbulb. Solrads look similar to emanata<\/em>, except that at the center of emanat is a creature’s head; emanata indicate that the creature, most often human, is shocked or surprised.)<\/p>\n You may know already about the so-called interrobang<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n What first triggered the idea for the never-written article was a book, A B C Et Cetera<\/em>, 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.)<\/p>\n 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<\/em> 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<\/em> — Latin for (surprise!) question<\/em>.<\/p>\n Why is this word important?<\/p>\n Take its first and last letters, and stack them one atop the other:<\/p>\n Q Oh, heck, while you’re at it why not exaggerate the first:<\/p>\n Q<\/span> See where this is going? Right: our (relatively modern) punctuation mark, ?, came from the (stylized) first and last letters of the word Q<\/em><\/strong>UAESTI<\/em>O<\/em><\/strong>. 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<\/em> was a general-purpose exclamatory, along the lines (as the Humez boys say) of our latter-day “Hey!” And stacking it, as with Q<\/strong>UAESTIO<\/strong><\/em>‘s first and last letters, gives you:<\/p>\n I<\/span> (Look familiar? Ding ding ding!)<\/p>\n 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<\/em>, as opposed to simple speech balloons). And they address other punctuation marks proposed from time to time, such as:<\/p>\n (Going back to the ! = “Io” example, I like that with the deflation point, you might consider it to say, with something like resignation, “Oi…”)<\/p>\n A B C Et Cetera<\/em> 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.”<\/p>\n If you’d like to see some of the Humezes’ book for yourself, you can find it in searchable “preview” form on Google Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n Finally, I direct your attention to Halfbakery<\/a>, described on its About page thusly:<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Back in 2003, one such invention<\/a> (from member phundug) was described as follows:<\/p>\n 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. 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n to which one commenter replied:<\/p>\n If you’re going to curse, curse. None of this $#!^ shit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Ha!<\/p>\n Bonus (non-family-appropriate): <\/strong>Phil Selby, of The Rut<\/em><\/a>, offers the following cartoon (title: “This cartoon wrote a sweary word on your toilet wall”), depicting a character in the throes of rebellion against the whole ugly grawlix trend (click the image to see the original, including its caption):<\/p>\n‽<\/div>\n
\no<\/strong><\/p>\n
\no<\/strong><\/p>\n
\no<\/strong><\/p>\n\n
\n#!@ means _______
\n%$^ means _______
\n%$# means _______
\netc.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/graf_half.gif?resize=425%2C214&ssl=1\" "\\"Excerpt")
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