The personalities of punctuation marks, with a touch of history

[LettersFromTatyana]

I ran across this silly little article that assigns personalities to different punctuation marks, and thought others in a similarly silly mood might enjoy it. My personal favorite (even with the grammatical mistake):

The Ampersand. The Ampersand is an artist and dancer and amateur calligrapher who always smells of fragrant lilacs. She serves cupcakes when you come and visit for tea, and they are decorated perfectly in a pastel frosting that's neither to sweet nor too tart. Her favorite color is lemon yellow, and she shops at Anthropologie, where she picked up a symbol of herself that's displayed prominently in her apartment, even if she knows that's a bit narcissistic. Is being proud of oneself so wrong? & no, she says it's not.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/entertainment/2012/08/imagined-lives-punctuation-marks/56023/



If you want something a tad more scholarly, see this link to "The Accidental History of the @ Symbol" from Smithsonian, which traces the symbol from the Middle Ages/Renaissance to the present:

The origin of the symbol itself, one of the most graceful characters on the keyboard, is something of a mystery. One theory is that medieval monks, looking for shortcuts while copying manuscripts, converted the Latin word for “toward”—ad—to “a” with the back part of the “d” as a tail. Or it came from the French word for “at”—à—and scribes, striving for efficiency, swept the nib of the pen around the top and side. Or the symbol evolved from an abbreviation of “each at”—the “a” being encased by an “e.” The first documented use was in 1536, in a letter by Francesco Lapi, a Florentine merchant, who used @ to denote units of wine called amphorae, which were shipped in large clay jars.

The symbol’s modern obscurity ended in 1971, when a computer scientist named Ray Tomlinson was facing a vexing problem: how to connect people who programmed computers with one another. <snip> Tomlinson’s eyes fell on @, poised above “P” on his Model 33 teletype. “I was mostly looking for a symbol that wasn’t used much,” he told Smithsonian. “And there weren’t a lot of options—an exclamation point or a comma. I could have used an equal sign, but that wouldn’t have made much sense.” Tomlinson chose @—“probably saving it from going the way of the ‘cent’ sign on computer keyboards,” he says.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Accidental-History-of-the-at-Symbol-165593146.html

 

[Handley_Page]

Thank you for that explanation; I had thought it was a medieval scribe's handiwork like short-hand..


I have a feeling there's an error here:

 The first documented use was in 1536, in a letter by Francesco Lapi, a Florentine merchant, who used @ to denote units of wine called amphorae, which were shipped in large clay jars.

The amphorae ARE the jars.

 

[estragon]

Handley, I think what Lapi meant was that amphorae was a measure of wine, derived from the classical term that originally meant the container itself. So for him and his fellow merchants, amphorae was a quantity like gallons or litres. So he may have said something like "This shipment is 40 amphorae of rather mediocre Chianti, in 40 one-amphorae clay jugs."

 

[estragon]

Tatyana, great essay, thanks for posting. As an ex-copy editor, those punctuation marks are like personal friends.