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My only reservation was that it featured an cast of anthropomorphic animals, a story device that rarely appeals to me. I knew a little of the information already, but I didn’t even know the names of some of the symbols, much less their history. Without Houston’s clever, friendly style, this still would have been a fascinating book, using specific symbols and marks to trace the evolution of the written word.
Author Keith Houston presents scholarly material with a conversational tone accessible even to school-age readers. w czasie przeplatające się wątki i osnowy poszczególnych znaków, pozwala dostrzec współtworzoną przez nie tkaninę pisma jako takiego. Houston also spends quite some time on the origin of the official name octothorpe for the symbol; another odd punctuation name "pilcrow" is the backwards P that is used by word processing software to represent paragraph spacing. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. My screen is always sprinkled with tiny dots floating in midair between words and pilcrows hanging off of the edges of paragraphs.Houston covers some of the same territory, noting that quotation marks arose from the Christian desire to be as exact and accurate as possible in attributing speech to Jesus. Impossible to read this one and not find yourself exhausting friendships with a million "did you know . A big thank you to Jim Hughes at Codex99, whose article was the catalyst for my chapter on the HP-35. This meant the calculator could run on tiny coin-shaped cells rather than the bulky cylindrical batteries of its competitors.
A lovely book about a fascinating subject, spoiled slightly by too many digressions that work against understanding.As you might expect, Shady Characters has images scattered across the text, all with helpful, manicule directed, captions underneath! Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. I’m counting down to Christmas by way of a collection of beautiful, clever, important, and/or outright odd calculators and calculating devices. More usefully, the twisted road to modern typography takes you past some genuinely interesting historical waypoints.
And in each chapter, Houston pulls together seemingly unrelated threads of history into a fascinating story of the origin of a familiar typographical or punctuation mark. A series of strange events, however, makes her wonder about the extent to which Henry is in over his head.
I appreciated that the book honestly admitted the gaps in knowledge on this subject rather than trying to make theories into fact. It might surprise some readers just how ancient some of the most common punctuation marks have been around; and their histories of each are fascinating in their own right. Not only was the writing engaging, but it did a wonderful job integrating the story of these various symbols into the context of the wider world of human affairs. If you love history, learning new information about the world around you, love trivia, and were someone who often wondered what that little paragraph sign was in word documents then you will enjoy this book very much.
For all ebook purchases, you will be prompted to create an account or login with your existing HarperCollins username and password. Founded a decade earlier on an excess of pluck and a surfeit of ambition, inventor Clive Sinclair’s company had matured from home-built transistor radios to stylish hi-fi gear. Officially known as the octothorpe, it apparently derives originally from the Latin libra (scales) pondo (to weigh). If you’ve never seen one before, there’s a good example of a rectangular slide rule belonging to the US astronaut Sally Ride in a previous post here at Shady Characters.
There were apparently a whole bunch of different dash lengths used for different effects that have now all been reduced to the simple -.
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