Tag: punctuation
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The typewriter emoji is dead; long live the typewriter emoticon
Richard Polt reports sad news from the Typewriter Insurgency: A few years ago I kvetched about the lack of a typewriter emoji and even started a letter-writing campaign. Well, there is a formal and elaborate process for requesting a new emoji. And since nobody else seemed to be doing it, I sat down last summer and created a proposal that […]
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Abolish the apostrophe!
I came out against irregular superlatives. I lobbied for the interrobang. Now throw this on my personal 2018 platform: Abolish the apostrophe. James Harbeck laid out the case against them a few years ago in an article that, to make his point, lacks apostrophes: Why are so many people so confused by apostrophes? Because they […]
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Notes on Shady Characters
Keith Houston’s 2013 book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks is like catnip for word nerds. It’s rife with historical trivia about the more uncommon punctuation marks that have littered language history, including the pilcrow (¶), dagger (†), and interrobang (‽). It also provides background on the symbols we […]