Hyphen Confusion – Or Should That Be Hyphen-Confusion?

Hyphen Confusion (or should that be ‘hyphen-confusion’?) Double-barelled names are becoming more and more current as society gets used to women not changing their last names upon getting married, but double-barelling it with their husband’s (sometimes, rarely, joined by those very husbands!), or passing their maiden name on to their double-barelled children. Not even speaking of […]

The Early Modern What-d’ye-call-it Hyphen, Part 2

In a previous post, I wrote about how we are using fewer and fewer hyphens these days. But going back in time does not mean returning to a hyphenated (literary) world either! Lately, I was playing around with some Renaissance manuscripts in the Bodleian library in Oxford, and discovered some curious punctuation habits (including hyphenation) by one prolific […]

Penis Punctuation

penis punctuation Just a nun, picking some penis for lunch. Yes, yes, I know.  The title is click-baity to get people reading. But it’s true. There is phallic-based punctuation. I mean, a mark looking like a penis, and deliberately being called so. But let’s begin at the beginning. In classical times, there was no such thing as […]

Book Review of a Book on Books

book review of a book on books I’ve got a long list of books on books to get through, but started with one for the general audience, The Book, by Keith Houston (who also wrote a book on punctuation, also for the public). I wasn’t exactly blown away by his punctuation book for reasons I’m still […]

‘A sad hand at your punctuation’: If writer’s don’t care, why should we?

‘A sad hand at your punctuation’: if writers don’t care, why should we? When I lived in Scotland while doing my PhD, I once threw a 90s music party for which people were asked to come dressed in what that era requires: garish make-up, pigtails, baggy shirts, large loud patterns. My flatmates didn’t believe it […]

The ‘sensuall-lyfe’ of Punctuation: Hyphen Part 3

Since it’s early stages of my project, I am focussing on brackets in romance in prose, but eventually I’d like to cover brackets in all kinds of romance, prose, poetry, and drama. So, as preparation for that second stage (and because it’s fun), I called up two manuscripts of John Harington’s Orlando Furioso translation. One, a beautifully-bound clean book […]

Bracket Spotting

Yesterday, I chatted to a friend via text, trying to find a day to take a walk together, and touch base. We hadn’t seen each other for a very long time, although we live in the same town (entirely my fault!). Sunday, I said to her, would be best, as on all the other days […]

Remember the Porter! Or the bracket on the 5th of November

ve been teaching Volpone by Ben Jonson today, and, in my preparation for the seminar, discovered the wonderful British Library pages on early modern drama and dramatists. They also showed an autograph letter of Jonson to Robert Cecil, James’ secretary of state, and secret service guy, written just days after the revelation of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. On […]