interpunct and virgule and solidus

Last essay I introduced ampersand, asterisk, interrobang and obelus, showing some of the interesting history of each. Today I will conclude my treatment of punctuation marks, focusing on a handful of other obscure but fascinating terms. Let me begin, however, with a near neighbor to obelus, a word so unlikely in its look and so hard to pronounce that one wonders how it ever became attested in English speech. It has nothing to do with punctuation but is too good to lose. It is obeliscolychny. Whereas sometimes the OED calls a word "rare" or "obsolete," this word is labeled "Obs. rare." This probably is a double warning not to touch it. Then, there is an obelus before the word, indicating either that it has died or that it ought to be interred. Undaunted, I bring you obeliscolychny. It is only attested in an English translation of Rabelais' works, a sure sign that we have a nonce word. All you have to know is that an "obeliskoluchnion" is, in ancient Greek, a "spit used by soldiers as a lamp-holder," and then you understand, "Ho, Ho! I see Land..I see a Light on an Obeliscolychny. Thus it is a lighthouse or a lampbearer, and the former is attested in the 1694 quotation: "We were conducted...by those Obeliscolychnys, Military-Guards of the Port, with high-crown'd Hats." This is more than enough on the term.

Virgule/Solidus

It is appropriate that I write the terms with a / in between, because the virgule and the solidus are both a "slash" of some kind. Well, you can look at it like this. If the "slash" is horizontal, you call it a "dash" or "hyphen," and if it is upright, you call it a line or column line. But if it is angled it is either a "virgule" or a "solidus." Most dictionaries and reference works declare these to be the same, but in fact they are not. It depends on the degree of tilt from the vertical. The slash more close to vertical is the virgule; more close to horizontal is the solidus.

But, in fact, I am not simply "angling" here for precision by virtue of degree of slant. The virgule and slash arise out of different conceptual worlds. The latter had to do with a sloping line used to separate shillings from pence, as 12/6, or in writing fractions. This, in turn, was derived from the other definition of solidus, which is a Roman gold coin minted in the time of Constantine (d. 337) to take the place of the previously standard coin: the aureus. Thus, the world of the solidus was the world of money and fractions of money.

The OED defines a virgule, however, as "a thin sloping or upright line (/, |) occurring in medieveal MSS. as a mark for the caesura or as a punctuation mark (frequently with the same value as the modern comma). So, the virgule arises out of codicology rather than numismatics or mathematics. From 1837: "In the manuscripts of Chaucer, the line is always broken by a caesura in the middle, which is pointed out by a virgule. On a lighter note, I recall that one of the most important cases I worked on in the practice of law revolved around virgules. In this case they were "slashes" between names on a checking account, and the legal question was the function of such a slash between names and whether that meant that one or both parties surrounding the virgule were obligated to sign the check. Of such is not the kingdom of heaven, but it is the world of mammon.

Octothorp

I love the story of the octothorpe, which can be told very briefly. Oh, the octothorpe is the # sign, which is sometimes called the "pound" or "number" or "hash" sign. It is a combination of the words "eight" and "thorp." A thorp is a "hamlet, village or small town; in ME. esp an agricultural village." The word is extremely old, being attested before 1000. From 1600: "Within a little thorpe I staid at last." Indeed, the OED even attests the word "thorpsman," to mean a "villager." "The inbred stock of more homely women and less filching Thorps-men."

Back to the octothorp. The OED has the following quotation from the March 30, 1996 edition of the New Scientist:

"The term ‘octothorp(e)’ (which MWCD10 dates 1971) was invented for ‘#’, allegedly by Bell Labs engineers when touch-tone telephones were introduced in the mid-1960s. ‘Octo-’ means eight, and ‘thorp’ was an Old English word for village: apparently the sign was playfully construed as eight fields surrounding a village."

This interpretation sees the eight "outer" areas as separate fields surrounding the central "village" in the middle--sort of like the layout of a medieval English town, with fields surrounding the village. Call it what you will, but as for me and my house, we will call it the octothorp.

Interpunct

Though the word is usually spelled interpunct, the more ancient attestation is interpunction, which first appeared in the English language in 1617. The OED defines it as "the insertion of points between words, clauses, or sentences." Indeed, anyone familiar with ancient MS knows that the only thing separating words was often a slight space or a point in the middle of the line. J Rendel Harris, a leading student of Syriac manuscripts and various ancient translations of the Bible (Professor at Cambridge in the late 19th century), could write:

"Interpunction in the wider sense of insertion of a distinguishing point is as old as the Moabite Stone, in which every word is divided from the rest by a single point; a fashion which we find occurring in Greek MSS. of late date."

Then, as with many other concepts with a clear linguistic field, we have a figurative use of the term. From a theological text of 1640: "Our life is full of interpunctions or commas: death is but the period or full point." I am not sure it would be a good bedside manner for a pastor or doctor to inquire about potential interpuncts of the patient, so I will leave the word right here.

Conclusion

There are other words, such as asterism (three dots, with two above the third) or the backslash, which was invented by Bob Bemer in the early 1960s in a computer programming exercise. But we have done enough to show that not only the "hints" given in a literary text to aid its understanding are numerous and complex but that the words to describe them are just as interesting. I hope you agree.

1795