Ready for Rish? How ! can get you the job. Or not.

Ready for rish? How ! can get you the job. or not. Three Prime Ministers within three months (two months, really). The UK is burning through politicians like a chainsmoker through free cigarettes. Candidates just keep coming like lemmings, voluntarily throwing themselves off the cliff into and out of the revolving doors at Number 10. […]

Of Faces and Fonts

of faces and fonts I gave a paper yesterday at Geneva University where I did a postdoc on Shakespeare in seventeenth-century Germany. I spoke about the history of punctuation, how people invented signs such as the semi-colon and of course my brackets in the fifteenth century, what the prescriptions and descriptions of use were, followed […]

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 […]

Splendid Isolation

Like most of us, I haven’t been able to work much these past two weeks. It’s slate winter/spring 2020. The escalation of the current situation makes everything else small. So it’s been a bit of a drag to open a book, or even think of research. Not because I don’t like it, or don’t believe […]