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...
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.
Read more →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...
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.
Read more →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!
Read more →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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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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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...
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...
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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