A genuine miscellany this week; a grab-bag of punctuational ephemera to chew over at your leisure. First, I would draw your attention to Benjamin Samuel’s forensic, heart-breaking, and hilarious ode to the comma at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. I quote:
Ladies and gentlemen: the Shady Characters book is now available for pre-order at W.W. Norton, Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, Barnes & Noble and The Book Depository.
Phew. Wow, even.
After months of writing, editing and proof-reading with the help of Brendan Curry, Laurie Abkemeier, Rachelle Mandik and many others, it feels like everything has happened in a rush. The loose, printed proofs arrived in the post a couple of weeks back, closely followed by the bound proofs, and now by the appearance of the book itself at Norton, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Readers will, of course, be familiar with the interrobang (‽), that most Madison Avenue of punctuation marks. Its name, like its shape, is equal parts question and exclamation: the Latin interrogatio, for a rhetorical question,1 combines with ‘bang’, a slang term for the exclamation mark. Until I started researching the history of the interrobang I had never come across this use of the word ‘bang’, but a quick check of the Typographic Desk Reference soon dispelled my ignorance: the TDR also lists ‘exclamation point’, ‘screamer’ and the rather risqué ‘dog’s cock’ as alternatives.2