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I have always wanted to know what things were properly called. Perhaps that is just a function of my "Adamic" tendencies, for Adam was put in the Garden not simply to till the ground but also to name everything in it. For example, as you go across the top line of the computer, above the numerals, are signs such s ~, which is the tilde; !, the exclamation point; @, which some are now calling the "atmark;" $, the dollar sign (I am skipping # for now), % the percentage sign; ^, the caret and others. In this and the next essay I would like to introduce six terms, a few of which you may already know, but all of which are known by nearly no one. I will introduce you to the ampersand, asterisk, interrobang, obelus, octothorpe and virgule. Though this essay is not an exercise in the history of punctuation, that subject does allure as a result of this. Expect some essays on that subject in the near future.

Ampersand

The OED defines ampersand (&) as "corruption of 'and per se--and', the old way of spelling and naming the character &; i.e., '& by itself = and." Thus, when the & appeared by itself, it was equivalent to "and," and thus it was known as the 'andperse' or, in modern language, 'ampersand' [It is also attested as the ampussy]. The Century tells us that it is (at least around 1910) called the "short and," and is formed by combining the two Latin letters e-t. If you look closely enough at &, you can see an "e" and "t" in it. The Century also notes that it was commonly placed at the end of the alphabet in primers. This helps us make sense out of George Eliot's 1859 quotation: "He thought it [Z] had only been put there to finish off th' alphabet like, though ampusand would ha' done as well." I don't know when this custom faded, but when I was learning the alphabet in the 1950s, I didn't learn the ampersand. Did you?

Asterisk

Asterisk is either a noun or a verb and means, in the former, a little star. Thus, anything shaped like a star could be so called. In the Eastern Orthodox Church an asterisk was a star-shaped instrument of gold or silver placed above the chalice and paten to prevent the veil from touching the elements. But the use of asterisk (*) as a mark of punctuation or notation is very old, going back to Wyclif's Prologue to his translation of II Chronicles (1382). This gets us to the history of punctuation, which is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that an asterisk was used in ancient and medieval manuscripts to indicate either an omission of words or to distinguish words and phrases as conjectural or obscure. It could also divide verses (before they were numbered), as indicated in this 1824 quotation: "The Asterisk divides each verse of a Psalm into two parts."

Interrobang

This is the newest punctuation mark in the English language, and is a combination, in one character, of the question mark and exclamation point. Though we write it as !?, it really is the question mark overlaid on the exclamation point. Invented in 1962 by Martin K. Specter in an article written for TYPEtalks Magazine, the Interrobang was created to fill a gap in our punctuation where one wanted to express both astonishment and a question in the same sentence. For example, when I was growing up around NYC in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I listened to the New York Yankees (boo-hiss) all the time. Mel Allen was one of the broadcasters. After an astonishing play by one of the Yankees, he would say, in his Alabama drawl, "How about that?!" Mel was expressing both surprise and a sort of question with these words. After Speckter invented the word, the Wall Stree Journal ran an article on it, and gave the example of "Who forgot to put gas in the car?!" as deserving an Interrobang at the end. Too bad that the word hasn't, in general, caught on. The OED doesn't list it. The Wikipedia describes it as a "rarely-used, non-standard English-language punctuation mark.." I like it, and encourage you to use it, even as a sign of protest, in your next written communication. Why wouldn't you do that?!

Obelus

I'll finish this essay with comments on obelus. The Century informs us that obelus is derived from the Greek word meaning "spit, a pointed pillar, or a mark used in writing." Thus, the obelus is so called from its resemblance to a spit, which is usually made like a dash (-) or like an obelisk or dagger. Surprisingly then, for me, the obelus could either be a horizontal line in a text or a dagger-like mark. Further, beginning in about 1659, according to this source, the obelus was first used as a symbol for division (with a dot above and below the dash) in the book Teutsche Algebra by Johann Rahn. Thus, we can understand how the last emerged, because it is the combination of both of the previous obeli--a horizontal dash and the dagger, which looks similar to the dots above and below the line. A quotation from 1475 shows the way that the obelus was used in medieval times: "Mony men..hade noo audacite to detray that the LXX (Septuagint--Greek Old Testament) interpretores had more then men of Hebrewe, puttenge signes called obeli, to betokyn superhabundaunce." One of the first modern usages of the word is in Alexander Pope's 1715 translation of Homer's Iliad: "The ancient Criticks..gave the Verses two Marks; by the one (which was the Asterism) they intimated, that the four Lines were very beautiful (but see the above discussion of asterisk); but by the other (which was the Obelus) that they were ill placed."

It sounds to me that just as there was no consensus on spelling until well into the 19th century, that there was no standardized meaning to various punctuation or diacritical marks surrounding a text.

Let's now turn to the last two, and make some comments on what we have discovered.

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