One of only a couple of impulse buys after I decided to stop buying books for a while. It just looked too interesting to resist. It's the back stories of various punctuation symbols. It was a fascinating read overall. Some had more gripping stories than others, but it's more than just interesting information, it ends up branching off into different areas of written language evolution, typography, internet origins, and even ancient politicking over religious texts. So, kind of what you'd expect and kind of not at the same time. It's not a long book and a good quarter of it is footnotes and citations for serious word-nerds, not just casual fans like me. It's also filled with photo copies of some of the old texts where you can see the seeds of what the different symbols would become, so it's not quite as many pages of explanation dedicated to each one, but more than you'd think.
I personally expected the deep dive into all these symbols but what I didn't expect was the choices the author made. I thought they'd be some of the more common symbols like periods, colons, question marks, or apostrophes. And while quotation marks are the subject of one chapter and things like hyphens and dashes are in others, most of them were things that I hadn't really thought about. From the more familiar ampersand (&) to the lesser known manicule... that disembodied hand in the margin pointing to a line of text. Look up an image if you don't know what I'm referring to. And some things I didn't realize had official names, like the pilcrow (¶) and the Octothorpe.. What?.. Oh you mean the pound sign/hashtag (#) ? Then there was the interrobang which I knew of, but didn't realize was still in widespread use. It's a hybrid question mark/exclamation point. And there's things I'd never heard of like "ironics" and sarcasm and snark marks. I don't think they've ever gained much traction. I can think of several others I'd like to see written about if the author was to do a sequel. Or, I guess I could research them myself. They were all very interesting in their own way.
It was just a delightful brain tickler of a book and I recommend it as an entertaining change of pace from what your normal reading list has on it. You won't be sorry. Unless you're just not interested in these sorts of things. I guess I wouldn't want to read mathematics histories.. Lol.
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