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Shady Characters
Personal blog · shadycharacters.co.ukhistorydesign
Shady Characters is a personal blog at shadycharacters.co.uk about history and design. Since 2011, 34 different Hacker News readers have linked it 49 times, most often “Emoji, part 1: In the Beginning”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-02, and you can follow it by feed.
The secret life of punctuation
Most-linked posts?
- Emoji, part 1: In the Beginning4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-08-26
- The Ampersand3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-06-12
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-03
- The secret life of punctuation - ¶ (The Pilcrow)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-02-21
- Miscellany № 59: the percent sign2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-03-17
- The History of the "@" Symbol (Part 1)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2011-07-24
What Hacker News says?
This article takes its content from the book "Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks" by Keith Houston. The book originated on his website as a series of articles, the "&" ones are: - The Ampersand, part 1 of 2 ( https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-1-o... ) - The Ampersand, part 2 of 2 ( https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-2-o..…
Comment linking /2011/07/the-ampersand-part-2%c2%bd-of-2/
on “The History of ‘Ampersand’ (2020)”Submitted The secret life of punctuation - ¶ (The Pilcrow) as a story · 148 points
HN discussionThe bottom row of this has some more examples: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/... (found via Google Image Search for italic ampersand ). The one in the second column from the left (again, bottom row) is how I write my ampersands by hand.
Comment linking /wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/roman-italic-ampersands.png
on “Sans Bullshit Sans: leveraging the synergy of ligatures (2015)”Submitted The History of the "@" Symbol (Part 1) as a story · 91 points
HN discussionHowever, for anyone who does happen to be interested in the history of emoji, Keith Houston's Shady Characters blog has a ten(!) part series [0] on them. [0] https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-be...
Comment linking /2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-beginning/
on “I Stopped Using Emojis”Submitted Miscellany № 59: the percent sign as a story · 83 points
HN discussionBut it doesn't mean / 100, it means "per 100" as described here in "The history of the percent sign" http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2015/03/percent-sign/
Comment linking /2015/03/percent-sign/
on “Nix the Tricks: Math tricks defeat understanding”Submitted The Pilcrow, pt. 2 as a story · 41 points
HN discussionYou may also find its history interesting then: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/02/the-pilcrow-part-1/
Comment linking /2011/02/the-pilcrow-part-1/
on “Hit Shift key 4x on a NYTimes article and see what happens”Submitted Emoji, part 6c: to infinity and beyond? as a story · 31 points
HN discussionThe blog "Shady Characters" has a lot of great investigation about the history of the Octothorpe[1], and similarly the Pilcrow[2], Ampersand[3], and "commercial at"[4]. [1]: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/05/the-octothorpe-part... [2]: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/02/the-pilcrow-part-1/ [3]: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-... [4]: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/07/…
Comment linking /2011/07/the-symbol-part-1-of-2/
on “Octothorpe”Submitted Pilcrows in the service of science: a Shady Characters field trip as a story · 11 points
HN discussioni love the fact that the first century BCE Tironian et still shows up in irish gaelic signs today. [1] the shady characters blog has a great write up on Cicero and his scribe Tiro [2] [1] http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-... [2] http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-...
Comment linking /2011/06/the-ampersand-part-1-of-2/
on “Identify mystery text, win $1000”Submitted The Octothorpe, Part 1 as a story · 11 points
HN discussionThis appears to be a lightly summarised excerpt of Houston's (fascinating) book "Shady Characters". As mentioned briefly at the end of the article, he has an interesting blog where he discusses more: http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk .
Comment linking /
on “The mysterious origins of punctuation”Submitted Year of the Asterisk as a story · 10 points
HN discussionThis reminds me of Keith Houston's wonderful blog, Shady Characters ( http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/ ). Keith has written at length on the pilcrow, interrobang, and sarcasm marks (all touched upon briefly in this article) amongst other punctuation marks. I am somewhat surprised that Shady Characters was not cited by the article. There is simply no better place to learn the surprising, entertaining histories of ou…
Comment linking /
on “Is This the Future of Punctuation?”Submitted The Pilcrow (¶), part 3 as a story · 8 points
HN discussionMight I also recommend Keith Houston's wonderful book "Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks": https://shadycharacters.co.uk/books/shady-characters-the-boo... He also posts, with some regularity, to his blog on the same topic: https://shadycharacters.co.uk/ Employing the correct usage of hyphens, en dashes and em dashes continues to be a small daily joy for me.
Comment linking /
on “A History of Punctuation”Submitted Shady Characters » The Interrobang, part 1 as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThe 8-part series this comes from (starting here [1]) was a really good read. Very informative, regardless of one's stance on emoji. [1] https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-be...
Comment linking /2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-beginning/
on “Emoji, part 6c: to infinity and beyond?”Submitted Emoji, part 10: state of the nation as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThat's nothing compared to Shady Character's article on it[1] (if anything, this feels more like a summary of it ). [1] http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/06/the-ampersand-part-...
Comment linking /2011/06/the-ampersand-part-1-of-2/
on “Interesting backstory of harmless "&"”Submitted Emoji, part 1: In the Beginning as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf you need something free/opensource, there’s not many options. When you like it old-school, you can give Knuth’s companion to TeX MetaFont¹ a try. Then there’s FontForge², which is by far the most evolved, feature-heavy project, but until recently had bad UX/UI and was a pain to install and run on OSX. It seems, that’s changed, though. FontLab³ still is the type design “industry”’s de facto standard font editor, b…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: How to develop a font for experimental punctuation project?”Submitted Computer-driven hot-metal typesetter as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> It wasn't a letter of the alphabet any more than the dollar sign, the pound sign, or punctuation were letters of the alphabet. I'm not aware of historic English alphabets that include the dollar or pound sign or any sort of punctuation. On the other hand there is a lot of evidence of & being part of the alphabet. Wikipedia has or links to plenty of cases: * Old Saxon alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Eng…
Comment linking /2011/07/the-ampersand-part-2%C2%BD-of-2/
on “Ampersand was once “and per se and” & was the 27th letter of the alphabet”Submitted Mac to hot metal press as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThis series on it https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2011/04/the-interrobang-part-1... was always one of my favorites on the topic.
Comment linking /2011/04/the-interrobang-part-1/
on “How many of the 170k English words do you know?”Submitted The secret life of punctuation as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
