Keith Houston's Blog, page 18
July 23, 2015
Miscellany № 63: punctuating the summer
I’ll be on holiday this coming week, enjoying the final stage of the Tour de France in Paris with my wife Leigh (as she put it when she suggested the trip: “lycra is optional, the Louvre is not”), but here are a few punctuational links to tide you over until I’m back. Are you a […]
July 12, 2015
The imminent death of the paragraph
As I mentioned last time, I recently took part in a workshop on the subject of “punctuation in practice”. My presentation there was titled “Ghostwritten: the vanishing pilcrow”, and it traced the life of the paragraph mark from ancient marginal dash (—) to medieval capitulum (¢) to pilcrow (¶), as shown in the slide reproduced […]
June 28, 2015
Punctuation in Practice: a Workshop
My mind is spinning. Last weekend I attended “Punctuation in Practice”, a workshop on punctuation held at the leafy Dahlem campus of Berlin’s Freie Universität. I was there along with six other participants at the invitation of Dr Elizabeth Bonapfel, a postdoctoral fellow who has written extensively on American and English literature, with a particular […]
June 16, 2015
A reminder: how to subscribe to Shady Characters
There have been a welter of informative and thought-provoking comments here lately (including some from Choz Cunningham, inventor of the snark, or “.~”), but all this activity is sometimes a little hard to follow. As such, I thought I’d post a reminder that it’s possible to subscribe directly to posts and to comments via dedicated […]
June 8, 2015
It’s (traditional Chinese) paperback publication day!
Another day, another edition of Shady Characters! The handsome book on the right is the Chinese complex characters (also called traditional characters) edition, courtesy of Taiwan’s Rye Field Publications. The cover design is by Chang Lien Hung, aka elf-19, and I can promise you that it is far better looking in real life than my […]
May 26, 2015
Miscellany № 62: the absence of punctuation
Just the one punctuation-related link this week: Shady Characters is upping sticks and moving to London this coming week, and blogging time is scarce! So: to Canada, where the National Post recently reported on a PhD thesis that contains no conventional punctuation.[1] Submitted to the University of British Columbia by architect Patrick Stewart, a member […]
May 11, 2015
Pilcrows in the service of science: a Shady Characters field trip
At the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh on the city’s Blackford Hill, in the depths of its oldest building, is a locked, climate-controlled room. That room is a library, and it houses the world’s most important collection of antiquarian books on astronomy. I’ve been working up at the observatory[*] for the past few months and, recently, […]
April 26, 2015
A brief history of the # and the @
Things are busy here at Shady Characters and I’m afraid there’s no time for a proper entry this weekend. What I can offer you instead is the brief history of the # and the @ that I put together recently for the Penguin Books blog — have a read, and feel free to drop by […]
April 13, 2015
Miscellany № 61: verbal irony seeks meaningful relationship. No, really.
Well, hello there. You all know the handsome fellow that adorns the cover of this book, don’t you? This is the ironieteken, the brainchild of type designer Bas Jacobs, and it is used to terminate an ironic statement.[1] Specifically, it is intended to punctuate verbal irony, where a speaker or writer says one thing but […]
March 30, 2015
Miscellany № 60: the secret life of the tilde
I am guilty of having somewhat ignored the tilde, or ‘~’, here at Shady Characters. Having just read Joseph Bernstein’s excellent, recent BuzzFeed article on the subject of “The Hidden Language of the ~Tilde~”,[1] however, I thought I’d take a fresh look at this quirky sun-dried hyphen. Joseph opens his article with a lament: Last […]
