The fabled punctuation rant
Alright so I gotta preface this with the fact that I'm not an expert - just some lowly fool who got too invested in Wikipedia articles. I don't do this stuff for a living and I sure as hell can't absorb everything a wikipedia article is saying. That being said lets launch into the random ass things I've learned from my journeys online. this one's a real long one so to protect your dash I'll give a list of topics here and leave you to decide if you want to keep reading.
Copyleft
Pilcrow
Ordinal Indicators
Ampersand
(something really special)
lets start with something small
Copyleft
So if you've looked at anything online under the Creative Commons License or the GNU General Public License, there's a good chance you've seen this symbol. What you may not have known is that this is called. It's call the copyleft symbol. Because. Because the copyright symbol has the C facing to the right and. and this one has it facing to the left. Absolutely abhorrent, except for the fact that the first use of this term was in 1976 when a free version of BASIC was developed and the developer left "@COPYLEFT ALL WRONGS RESERVED" in the code. So if you see this symbol think alternative piracy
anyways let's get to something spicy
Pilcrow
Yeah that's what this paragraph symbol is called. A fuckin pilcrow. Apparently its because people got worse and worse at pronouncing the greek paragraphos. Which is funny because that's literally almost the word we call it today because nobody cares about a word like pilcrow. What's worse is how this symbol even exists
So back in ancient greece if you wanted to divide sentences into groups what you'd do is write a little horizontal line in the left margin between the lines that you wanted to separate. which you know is kinda okay but a little crowded, eventually they switch it to a capital gamma (Γ), and finally somebody gets the bright idea of making the first letter of a section REALLY BIG. In terms of visually separating groups, what a snazzy way of getting that done. So snazzy that a lot of you are probably aware that's a style that a lot of authors brought back at some point.
But then. oh god and then. and then people really liked using latin abbreviations. You see, people saw the latin word for head, "kaput", and started using the letter K in the margin to mark the head of a new section. AbhORRENT. but it got WORSE because if there's anything people like more than using latin words is using LONGER latin words. enter "capitulum" meaning little head. An even dumber word that they decided to switch to and everybody starts using the letter C instead of the letter K.
Eventually people got bored of this and started putting lines through it and/or filling it in. Look at this utter shit
see where this is going?
wait go back go back what the hell was that
no I'm not talking about that damn ampersand yet. Let's take a quick pit stop at
Ordinal indicators
Okay so real quick. There's numbers called cardinal numbers, to denote size (like 174 spiders), and there's numbers called ordinal numbers, to denote order (like spider number 175). But how do you know if a number is ordinal or cardinal just by looking at it?
mmm okay so basically they took the last two letters of the word "fourth" and threw it up in the corner. I'm sure you're all familiar with this. but what I learned is that since other (gendered) languages have different words they naturally do different things. observe:
Which y'know is actually pretty cool! Except for the fact that in spanish, in front of singular masculine nouns you gotta say "primer" and "tercer" for the numbers 1 and 3, so you just throw an "er" up there instead.
It's time for the main event. The one you've all been waiting for.
What the hell is an
Ampersand
This one's a doozy.
So basically it starts with latin because why not. Y'know how when kids grow up learning the latin alphabet they have to recite the alphabet and memorize the order? Apparently back in the day it was hip to add "per se X" after any letter X that could exist by itself in a sentence - like A, I, and O (because that was a word back then). So the alphabet chant would start with "A per se A, B, C, ... " and do the same thing for I and O.
Now this is all fine and dandy unless you count the word "and" as a letter in the alphabet, which by then some people definitely did, and used the "&" symbol we know and love. I'll get into how that symbol came to be in a sec. Anyways, when kids finished reciting their alphabet, they'd end it "X, Y, Z, and per se and" which is a ridiculous combination of sounds to make, and eventually got slurred to "ampersand." That's literall y it. That's why we call it that - a clusterfuck of an infatuation of latin
oh but you don't even know the HALF of it
You see, the latin word for "and" was "et" and as we all know, one of the things humans are the worst at is consistently writing small words the same way every time. Let's take a look at the ampersand in the font Trebuchet MS.
I swear to god.
This enTIRE time this ampersand thingy exists because people got bored of writing an e and a t as seperate letters and created a monstrosity nobody knows how to write anymore. seriously 5 minutes from now try writing an ampersand from memory and look at how bad it is. If they're gonna combine letters into a new symbol they might as well do it HELPFULLY.
Ugh
Anyways it's time for a special treat, and this won't disappoint.
Mystery Surprise
So some of you may have noticed back during the pilcrow section that the greek/latin writing systems didn't exactly have the whole separating sections of text thing figured out yet. Eventually they found their own systems, but what if you wanted to seperate groups of sections? Like if you're splitting a chapter of your book into different scenes? Some people decided to do this by using asterisms "⁂" between sections of text, others used fluerons "❧", and the list of symbols goes on. But guess what the hell they called these kinds of symbols.
I swear you're not ready.
They called it
They called it a dinkus
A
DINKUS
sure according to this blog it comes from the german root "ding" meaning "thing" but oh my god
Anytime you're reading a book and they have a stylized page break you have to look at that for me and please look at it and remember that it's called a dinkus
That's all I've got in me for now. maybe if you bother me enough I'll find something else to rant about in list format. Thanks for reading and don't forget about dinkuses
