“If commas are open to interpretation, hyphens are downright Delphic”*…
The tilde is 3,000 years old, but is there any grapheme that’s more ~of the times~? The little traveling worm, originally designed to convey approximation (and used in Spanish and Portuguese to denote certain sounds), expresses so much more: strangeness, emotional and physical distance — but perhaps most importantly, sarcasm…
The twisted mark’s twisted story in its entirety at “The Internet Tilde Perfectly Conveys Something We Don’t Have the Words to Explain.”
– Mary Norris (the New Yorker‘s “Comma Queen”)
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As we move our fingers to the upper left of our keyboards, we might send rib-tickling birthday greetings to Moses Harry Horwitz; he was born on this date in 1897. Better known by his stage name, “Moe Howard,” he was the de facto leader of The Three Stooges, both on stage and off.
Moe, flanked by Curly and Larry, in The Three Stooge’s classic “Disorder in the Court“