Table-talk of Parkus Grammaticus for May 9, 2008

I. Saki Knafo, a/k/a the greatest journalist in the world, is still on the paragraph symbol beat. We thought it was just called a pilcrow...until he came across this in a recent New Yorker:

"Alinea" is the word for the backward "P" symbol that proofreaders put at the beginning of a new paragraph.

II. A really smart take on Personal Days is up at Barnes & Noble Review—it's long and thoughtful and basically pull-quote-proof, and I'm doing it an injustice by cutting and pasting, but here's a taste:

In a nameless Manhattan office, a group of be-cubicled peons huddle in fear on the staticky carpeting. They are proofreaders, perhaps, or copywriters, or fact-checkers —at any rate their work (never discussed) is unfascinating and redolent of squandered IQ. Neon-blanched, sharing an intimacy that cannot thrive—that dies immediately, in fact—outside the strange conditions which created it, they have nonetheless made a world: pet names, in-jokes, the minor voodoo of office life....The fragmented narrative and shaggy-dog tangents of Personal Days operate in the service of a seeping, slow-build paranoia, of the sort that has sustained whole seasons of ABC’s Lost.

"The minor voodoo of office life"!

III. Save the date: I'll be giving my first post-publication PD reading on May 21 at McNally-Robinson. Then I'll chew the fat with my editor, Julia Cheiffetz, whose name I am invoking for the first time on The Dizzies!

As the pilcrow flies, or 'On the pleasures of designing the paragraph mark'

(1) Should the form be P-like or C-like? (2) Should there be one stroke or two? (3) Should the bowl be solid or open? (4) Should the bottom of the strokes be plain, seriffed, or flourished? (5) Should the top right corner finish with a serif or not? (6) Should the bowl exhibit contrast to match the alphabet, or be monolinear like the mathematical operators? (7) Should the bowl connect with the first stroke, the second stroke, both, or neither? (8) Should the character align with the capitals, or descend to match the lowercase? Together these simple decisions offer 768 possible outcomes... —"Pilcrow and Capitulum," Ask H&FJ

(Via Dzyd Jen.)

Dzyd trivia: What's the word for the number sign (#)?

He means the 'Ghost'?

A pilcrow is one of these: ¶. I didn’t know that. The little printer’s mark is unvoiced but eloquent, sundering streams of prose, heralding new paragraphs or staking out subclauses. It crops up often in legal and academic documents, but in fiction you would only expect to see one as an avant-garde manoeuvre, pegged into a page by an author who wanted to interrupt a conventional illusion, to alert the reader to something imposed or artificial. I suspect McSweeney’s uses them a lot. —Keith Miller, "The Clever Nostalgia of Adam Mars-Jones," TLS, March 26, 2008

UPDATE: Saki Knafo, aka the greatest journalist in the world, found this punctuational free-for-all in an AP story. Here Shaquille O'Neal appears to be visualizing his words in cartoon bubbles:

Of Riley's comments, O'Neal said colorfully, "I don't [care] how he interpreted it."

Reminded that reporters couldn't use the quote because of the expletive, he said, "Sure you can. You can quote me, brother. You can put an 's,' then the tic-tac-toe, the 'at' sign and then the other symbols."