Keith Houston's Blog, page 17

Miscellany Nº 67: irony’s restoration

November 23, 2015

We first met the Right Reverend John Wilkins FRS, renaissance man of the Restoration, back in 2011. A founding member of the Royal Society, brother in law to Oliver Cromwell and mad scientist extraordinaire, Wilkins was one of the seventeenth century’s most ardent devotees of what are now called conlangs, or constructed languages, and he expended a considerable amount of time and effort on his magnum opus on the subject, An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical...

Miscellany № 67: irony’s restoration

We first met the Right Reverend John Wilkins FRS, renaissance man of the Restoration, back in 2011. A founding member of the Royal Society, brother in law to Oliver Cromwell and mad scientist extraordinaire, Wilkins was one of the seventeenth century’s most ardent devotees of what are now called conlangs, or constructed languages, and he […]

Shady Characters at the BBC: punctuation that failed to make its mark

I had the pleasure, recently, of writing another article for BBC Culture. It’s called “Punctuation that failed to make its mark” and it’s a sort of Shady Characters greatest hits, a compilation of a few of my favourite marks that tried valiantly but unsuccessfully to achieve widespread acceptance. There’s Martin K. Speckter’s evergreen interrobang, or […]

Miscellany Nº 66: catching up

October 25, 2015

Things have been frantic around here lately. Mostly, I’ve been busy reviewing the proofs of The Book, of which more soon, but I’ve also written a pair of articles for other publications, both of which were a lot of fun to address.

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Miscellany № 66: catching up

Things have been frantic around here lately. Mostly, I’ve been busy reviewing the proofs of The Book, of which more soon, but I’ve also written a pair of articles for other publications, both of which were a lot of fun to address. First up is this review for the Wall Street Journal of David Crystal’s […]

Logarithmical: Zipf’s Law and the mathematics of punctuation

Let’s try an experiment. If we start with some large body of text — post-war American novels, say, or twentieth-century British newspapers — and count all the occurrences of all the words in those texts, we can put together a fairly accurate list of the most popular words in English. The word “the” would be […]

Miscellany Nº 65: from gnomonology to palaeography

September 20, 2015

Palaeography is the study of old writing. And as often as I’ve had to hunt through old manuscripts for points (·), pilcrows (¶), virgules (/) and the like, I am not a palaeographer in anything more than the loosest sense. Given this, was a pleasant surprise to find myself chairing a session at a palaeography conference called DigiPal V, held at King’s College London just a couple of weeks ago. I was there at the invitation of Stewart Brookes, King’s College’s resident digit...

Miscellany № 65: from gnomonology to palaeography

Palaeography is the study of old writing. And as often as I’ve had to hunt through old manuscripts for points (·), pilcrows (¶), virgules (/) and the like, I am not a palaeographer in anything more than the loosest sense. Given this, was a pleasant surprise to find myself chairing a session at a palaeography […]

Shady Characters at the BBC

In lieu of a post this week, head over to BBC.com’s Culture section to read my article about “The Mysterious Origins of Punctuation” — it’s hot off the presses! Want to chat about it? Post a comment here or over at the related Facebook post. Shady Characters will readers be right at home, and I […]

Miscellany № 64: let’s gnomonise

Readers! Have you ever wanted a better name for “marks of punctuation”? No, me neither. And yet that is exactly what drove James Brown (no, not that one) to produce the page shown here in his rambling, esoteric An English Syntithology: In Three Books, Developing the Constructive Principles of the English Language of 1845.[1] Brown, […]