WS
on nothing. IMAGINEWEDSTILLWRITEWITHOUTSPACESLIKEBACKINTHEDAYSOFTHEGREEKSANDROMANSTEXTWOULDBESOHARDTOREADANDTAKELONGTODECIPHER This is pretty cumbersome to read. Where does one word start and another end? And yet this was precisely how text looked like for a very long time. No differences between upper and lower case, no punctuation, and (shriek!) no spaces between the words to tell where one started and another ended. […]
MT
ma(r)king time It’s the end of April and technically, it’s supposed to be a time for planting and growing seeds into seedlings, in order to see them flourish into proud young plants in the merry month of May. Sure, April was always going to be moody and fickle, offering us sun, rain, hail, thunder, snow, […]
KP
book rec klaxon! It’s dreamy, it’s gorgeous, and it’s precisely what you need if you’re feeling like slowing down and taking it all in quietly. What “it” is? I have no idea, but it’s there anyway. It’s Plainsong by Kent Haruf. A dear friend came to visit me last month (looking at you, stranger!), and she […]
ED
Hurray! It’s exclamation day! Last week, we celebrated international Women’s Day, today it’s *drum roll*… Yes, NATIONAL EXCLAMATION POINT DAY today! 13 March! That’s ! Day in the US, at least according to a bit of a random website. I haven’t been able to track whether it’s legit, and who proposed it, and to what […]
Exclamation Point, Exclamation Mark – Potato Potato?
Exclamation Point, Exclamation Mark – Potato Potato? What’s in a name? Juliet asks, continuing that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. I’m quoting from memory, but that’s the general drift: the essence of the thing is not in the name; the name is random; it’s just an accidentally assigned sound signifying […]
! in titles
shouty titles!!! What’s the easiest way to get attention? Slab a ! at the end of your words. Preferably more!!! That’s at least what some of the exclamation mark detractors say, but that’s, of course, not the whole story. Not even close. In my book, I explore how we can look at punctuation when we’re […]
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. […]
Is this the worst? Well, it’s certainly great semicolon use!
Is this the worst? Well, it’s certainly great semicolon use! Shakespeare’s infamously hopeless tragedy King Lear has lots of great lines when we are shocked and grieved by the incompetence of those supposed to lead us: in the play, hunger for power, greed for gold, personal revenge, and sheer malice and cruelty motivate kings, queens, and […]
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 […]
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 […]