əˈpɒstrəfiː apostrophe: 1) A rhetorical device in which the speaker breaks off from discourse in order to address a person or thing, absent or present; 2) The sign ’, used to indicate omitted letters, or the possessive case [I]t appears from the evidence that there was never a golden age in which the rules for … Continue reading Apostrophe: Part 1 →

If you were (according to my usual scenario) sedated, abducted and awoken in a foreign country, then a glimpse of a road-sign featuring all three of these special letters would mean you were in one of two places—Norway or Denmark. These are the three additional characters that go to make up the 29-letter Dano-Norwegian Alphabet—added, … Continue reading Letters From Abroad: Ash, Slashed-O, A-Ring →

If you were transported unconscious to a foreign country and then wakened in the street, a glimpse of this plumber’s van would tell you exactly where you were—only Icelandic contains the two unusual letters that feature in that first word viðhaldsþjónusta (“maintenance services”). In fact, the Icelanders refer to their letters ð and þ as séríslenskur: “uniquely … Continue reading Letters From Abroad: Edh and Thorn →

I’ve always been fascinated by the way languages other than English use letters other than our familiar 26—not so much completely different alphabets, like Greek, Arabic or Cyrillic, but those little tweaks to the Latin alphabet, ranging from unusual diacritical marks to additional letters, that other languages use to communicate particular sounds to their readers. … Continue reading Letters From Abroad: Eng →

The quotation mark has its origin in Europe in the centuries before printing, when documents were copied by hand. It started out as something called a diple. That word comes from Greek diplous, “double”, and a diple was, at its simplest, a line bent in half to form an arrowhead, like this: >. Diples were … Continue reading Quotation Marks →

Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) That’s Johnson’s entry for the letter “S” in his famous dictionary, and it’s clear that there’s something amiss with his lower-case s—in its printed form it looks more like an f, most of the time. This feature of 18th-century writing and typography has led some people … Continue reading The Long “S” →