Keith Houston's Blog, page 7

June 5, 2022

Miscellany № 95: invention, illumination, and evasion

Links! It is high time for a few links. Let’s start out with some scholarly appetisers before a good old-fashioned moral panic as dessert.

First up, anthropologist Piers Kelly, writing in the pages of Sapiens magazine, has penned a simple but compelling tale of how the Vai script of Liberia was invented and brought to its modern-day state in less than two centuries. Piers digs into how the accelerated evolution of the Vai script might be used to understand the development of ancient writing syst...

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Published on June 05, 2022 12:14

April 16, 2022

Miscellany #️⃣9️⃣4️⃣: flagging emoji?

If I learned anything as I wrote about emoji, it is that emoji is as dynamic as any “real” language. Here’s a recent development that demonstrates exactly that.

From the latest edition of Jennifer Daniel’s always-entertaining newsletter, “Did Someone Say Emoji?”, comes the news that Unicode is shutting down the pipeline of new flag emoji. Jennifer is the chair of the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee, so this comes straight from the 🐴’s mouth.

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Published on April 16, 2022 13:29

February 6, 2022

Miscellany № 93: a fistful of manicules

Underware, the Dutch/Finnish type foundry comprising Akiem Helmling, Bas Jacobs and Sami Kortemäki, is one that gets special characters. Bas’s ironieteken (), or irony mark, was one of the first characters I wrote about here. They’ve also done some interesting work towards a “Latin plus” character set — a collection of the more than 450 accented and non-accented characters needed to typeset the hundreds of languages, common and otherwise, that use the roman alphabet. Now, they’ve added what th...

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Published on February 06, 2022 00:37

December 5, 2021

Miscellany № 92: a lightly festive miscellany

Work continues apace on the new book, but here are a few links I couldn’t let go before the holidays are upon us.

First is this amusing and well-crafted video exploration of where the comma should go in the first line of the song God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen. Very clever, and very well executed. Kudos to its maker, Ramses the Pigeon.

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Published on December 05, 2021 02:53

November 11, 2021

Pardon our dust

You may notice some mangled characters here and there on the site: it looks as though a database upgrade on the shadycharacters.co.uk back-end has gone slightly awry. It is not a great look for a site dedicated to unusual typographical marks, but a resolution is underway and things should be back to normal soon. Thank you for your patience!

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Published on November 11, 2021 14:06

October 6, 2021

Ciemne typki competition: we have a winner!

Congratulations to Mykola Leonovych on winning a copy of the new edition of Ciemne typki, the Polish translation of Shady Characters! I asked entrants about their favourite marks of punctuation and why they liked them. Here’s Mykola’s winning entry:

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Published on October 06, 2021 13:04

September 24, 2021

Win a copy of Shady Characters for National Punctuation Day!

It’s the 24th of September, which means it’s National Punctuation Day! To celebrate, I’m giving away a copy of Wydawnictwo Karakter’s gorgeous Polish edition of Shady Characters. (My terrible photo does not do it justice – this is a great-looking book.)

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Published on September 24, 2021 13:09

August 16, 2021

Miscellany â„– 91: interrobang archaeology

Funny how time gets away with you in a late-stage pandemic, isn’t it? Here are a few somewhat recent stories of a typographic or emojinal (?) bent that Shady Characters readers may enjoy.

If you recall, the interrobang came into being back in 1962 and was immortalised just a few years later in Richard Isbell’s Americana typeface of 1967. As the first interrobang to take its place in a fully-fledged typeface, Isbell’s “open” version has a reasonable claim to being the canonical form of the charac...

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Published on August 16, 2021 10:56

Miscellany № 91: interrobang archaeology

Funny how time gets away with you in a late-stage pandemic, isn’t it? Here are a few somewhat recent stories of a typographic or emojinal (?) bent that Shady Characters readers may enjoy.


If you recall, the interrobang came into being back in 1962 and was immortalised just a few years later in Richard Isbell’s Americana typeface of 1967. As the first interrobang to take its place in a fully-fledged typeface, Isbell’s “open” version has a reasonable claim to being the canonical form of the chara...

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Published on August 16, 2021 10:56

July 4, 2021

A reminder: email subscriptions are changing

As I mentioned last week, email subscriptions are changing. If you subscribe to Shady Characters by email, or you’d like to do so, please read last week’s post to learn more. This will be the last post that goes out to existing email subscribers, so please make sure you update your subscription soon!

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Published on July 04, 2021 12:22