He gives history and usage for "the sensuous ampersand," the @ symbol, the irrepressible hash mark (a.k.a. the pound sign and the octothorpe), and the upstart interrobang, as well as the pilcrow, emoticons, and the search for an enduring irony mark.
In his new book, "Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks," Keith Houston reveals the stories behind esoteric punctuation marks, from the pilcrow to the manicule to the octothorpe, a.k.a. the hashtag.
The great punctuation comeback: on the rise of the octothorpe, alias the hash, the crunch, the hex, the flash, the grid.
Five years ago, Twitter's users invented what's now known as the hashtag: a pithy phrase, preceded by that hungry octothorpe, used to either label or comment on the preceding tweet.
The term octothorpe was coined by engineers at Bell Laboratories in the early 1960s, who wanted a name for one of two non-number function symbols on the first touch-tone keypads (the other was the *, which they called a sextile).
Houston discusses 10 major typographical marks or groups of symbols: the pilcrow, the interrobang, the octothorpe the ampersand, the @ symbol, the asterisk and the dagger (* and †), the hyphen, the dash, the manicule (☞, ☜, and ☝ or ☟), and quotation marks of various kinds (" ", ' ', and ).
It was first brought to a wider public thanks to its adoption by telephone engineers at Bell Labs in the 1960s as the generic function symbol on their new touch-tone phones – and if you're looking to sound clever, you could call it an "octothorpe", the tongue-in-cheek term coined at Bell to describe it.
According to the buzz on Twitter and the blogosphere, the rebranded symbol of 2010 is the octothorpe.
Don't worry – almost no one knows it's called an octothorpe, and most of those who do don't call it that.
The octothorpe is the essential symbol in the formation of a hashtag, a marker that allows 140-character tweets to be grouped together by subject (#boringtypographystories, for example).
By Keith Houston September 6, 2013 In his new book, "Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks," Keith Houston reveals the stories behind esoteric punctuation marks, from the pilcrow to the manicule to the octothorpe, a.k.a. the hashtag.
