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23 Comments to "The Origin of Everyday Punctuation Marks."
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Chris
July 9th, 2007 at
6:25 am
“he Latin word io, meaning “exclamation of joy” ”
today:
yo! wassup! -
Barjak
July 9th, 2007 at
6:54 am
Funny. In french, “ampersand” is called “esperluette”, which comes from the same origin than the english word : it was the 27th letter of the alphabet, but instead of being pronounced “and, per se, and”, it was “et, per se, et”.
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Dan
July 9th, 2007 at
7:31 am
I’m pretty sure Robert Recorde was Welsh, not English. (I went to Swansea University and had many lectures in the Robert Recorde room).
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Jerse
July 9th, 2007 at
8:04 am
I read somewhere that the octothorpe was created by a man who named it for the eight lines sticking out (-octo) and his favorite footballer David Thorpe.
I’m probably wrong though…
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Hula
July 9th, 2007 at
10:21 am
That’s the first time I’ve seen the name for an Octothorp. It’s always been the pound sign to me. I liked theses stories, especially about the ampersand.
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Paola
July 9th, 2007 at
10:52 am
I knew that the symbol that prince used was to be read TAFKAP (the artist formerly know as prince)
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name
July 9th, 2007 at
11:25 am
The dollar sign origins are still debated, as far as I know. The Wikipedia entry gives other possibilities.
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Matan
July 9th, 2007 at
2:10 pm
I’m quite certain that there is a step missing in the explanation for the exclamation mark.
“Io” must be an abbreviation for “Iocundum” or “Iocundia” which, indeed, means joy or jubilation. -
antinous
July 9th, 2007 at
2:44 pm
A delightful article only slightly marred by the period at the end of the headline.
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jp
July 9th, 2007 at
2:49 pm
This ‘octothorp’ etymology is almost certainly false.
Here’s a good-as-any discussion of the word’s uncertain and contested origin:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-oct1.htm -
thedude
July 9th, 2007 at
2:53 pm
there are alternate theories for the origin of the dollar sign here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_sign#Alternative_origin_hypothesis
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Chris
July 9th, 2007 at
4:50 pm
I read somewhere that the question mark represented the tail of a perplexed cat, with the dot standing for the anus. Makes sense doesn’t it ?
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dalas v
July 9th, 2007 at
8:33 pm
Fascinating article. Although I think Prince’s objection that lead to adopting the symbol was mostly based around the fact that Warner Brothers had trademarked the name “Prince,” and he was mad that they thought his name was their property.
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MadMolecule
July 10th, 2007 at
12:48 am
I’ve heard the “@” sign called an “ampersat.” I assume this is by analogy: “Ampersand” means “and,” so therefore “ampersat” must mean “at.” I can’t find any source backing this up, though.
Also, the interrobang is a punctuation mark whose time, I think, has come: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang
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Marilyn Terrell
July 10th, 2007 at
7:54 am
The @ symbol has an interesting origin, and people around the world have lots of different funny names for it:
http://intelligenttravel.typepad.com/it/2006/11/where_its.html -
Karen
July 10th, 2007 at
8:28 am
First, thanks to Alex at Neatorama, who encouraged me to post this in comments after I’d emailed it in.
It is true that the Latin word “io” is an interjection, although it can mean pain as well as joy:
IO, interj., expressing joy, “ho! huzza! hurra!” [references from Plautus, Horace, and Pliny]–II. Expressing pain. “oh! ah!” [references from Plautus and Tibullus]–III. Used in a sudden and vehement call, “holla! look! quick!” [references from Vergil and Ovid]. (Lewis & Short, A Latin Dictionary, 1879, pp.997-998)
I can find no evidence, however, for it being used as an abbreviation, and the reference sources I’ve checked (Encyclopedia Britannica Online: “Punctuation in Greek and Latin to 1600;” Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language: “Punctuation”) give no such origin story. What they do say is that the exclamation point wasn’t introduced into the punctuation pantheon until the 17th century and, as a student of medieval Latin palaeography, I can tell you that it makes no sense to have introduced abbreviations at a time when print had already taken over from handwritten manuscripts (the reason for the development of palaeographical abbreviations in the first place).
I find the source–Uncle John–to be incredibly suspect. Their origin story for the question mark, for example–Latin scholars most emphatically did NOT end query sentences with the word “qu[a]estio”–there was no need, as the query words were already built into the sentence. According to Cappelli’s “Dizionario di abbreviature latine ed italiane,” the definitive work on Latin abbreviations, “qu[a]estio” was originally abbreviated with “qtio” with a line over it. In the 15th century, “qo” with an arched line over it was introduced, but it would never have been placed at the end of a sentence.
According to the “Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language,” “The term QUESTION MARK has been used for less than a century: the earlier term was mark/point of interrogation (late 16c). It is a descendant of the punctus interrogativus, one of the marks found in 10–13c liturgical manuscripts, where it indicated inflection of the voice. The terms mark/note of exclamation and SEMICOLON both date from the 17c.”
I’m sorry to be such a pedant about this–and I’m happy to do further research into the orthography of the exclamation point–but this sort of folk etymology is a particular pet peeve of mine (I’m constantly debunking the email forwards I get from my mother, which purport to describe the origins of folk phrases), and I wanted to set the record a little straughter.
I fear that one must always be a little suspicious of historical data that comes from a book called Uncle John’s Supremely Satisfying Bathroom Reader. For a popular, readable, yet eminently accurate version of this kind of book, I highly recommend Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which should be in every thinking person’s library!
All the best,
Karen
p.s.–Uncle John also makes reference, in the entry on the ampersand, to the “Roman scribe Marcus Tullius Tiro.” Marcus Tullius Cicero, the orator and rhetor, did have a Greek slave named, simply, Tiro who acted as his scribe, and who invented a series of abbreviations that are known as “Tironian notes.” He did not invent the ampersand, however. Tiro’s abbreviation for “et” looked like a 7 (which is why I’ve always found a particular delight on the joining of the & and 7 on the same keyboard key). The use of the Tironian 7 as “et” continued well into the middle ages, and the introduction of the ampersand, which really is a contorted rendering of the actual word “et,” dates to around the 12th century. According to the OED, the etymology of the word “ampersand” is “Corruption of ‘and per se-and’, the old way of spelling and naming the character & ; i.e. ‘& by itself = and;’ found in various forms in almost all the dialect Glossaries.” This has nothing to do with the alphabet story offered via Uncle John.
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Tomos
July 10th, 2007 at
5:33 pm
Robert Recorde wo invented the equals sign was actually a Welshman not an Englishman. It’s a very big thing for us Welsh!
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yossi
July 11th, 2007 at
9:50 am
the us dollar sign is not from the Ps ! its originaly from US to mean United States and was placed in front of the dollare amount so as to mean X amount of dollars in US money! the US were later placed one on top of the other to for the symbol we know today . some lazy shmucks only use one line because there…well… lazy.
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david
July 17th, 2007 at
11:38 pm
The # sign is called “hash” (in Australia at least) especially by phone companies who use a button with this sign for various control functions
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Suckit
July 20th, 2007 at
1:02 am
Some facts need to be looked at again.
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wrongy
July 21st, 2007 at
5:24 pm
your “facts” are more like misinformation.
$ is the combination of U and S- making the US the only country with its name in its currency symbol.
it was used in early government bonds, later the bottom part of the U was cut off, and in the 20th cent ppl combined the lines.# is a pound sign- it derived from the abbreviation lb for the word libra which means pound in latin and spanish. typesetters used a special character for it â„” which is still available in our computer fonts, then it was simplified for shorthand writing.
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Runa
July 29th, 2007 at
12:02 am
I find it strange that the octothorpe would combine Latin and Old Norse. Octo would be Latin for eight as compared to aett in Old Norse. Thorp or Throp means estate or farm whereas vik, wick or vich means village. I am more inclined to believe the story of the Bell Lab engineers making up this word.
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Jeff Christen-Mitchell
October 7th, 2007 at
8:04 pm
The book “Why Cats Paint” by Heather Busch and Burton Silver credits the origin of the question mark to the “classic curled-over tail of the curious cat…right down to the dot at the bottom.
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