Spooky Punctuatiooooooon!
spooooky punctuatiooooon! Today is the 31st of October, so it’s that very special time of year. It’s been a beautifully mellow yellow autumn day over here; I’ve been working away in my garden; those floating little insects dancing up and down in the slanting rays of the afternoon sun; my doggo carefully watching the fence, […]
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 […]
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 […]