It's national punctuation day! In his new book Shady Characters, Keith Houston investigates the origin and evolution of such punctuation marks as the asterisk (*), the dagger (†), the at sign (@), the pilcrow (¶), and the octothorpe (#). But it is the quest of a father and son to invent a symbol for sarcasm that will live in infamy.
The irony mark’s inconstant digital existence, begun with the abortive importation of the temherte slaq and sustained by a succession of futile pretenders, has most recently borne witness to one particularly determined project that almost—almost—cracked the problem.
