On the Paragraph Symbol
I seem to be on a punctuation symbol mood lately in my posts, so here is another.
I was watching an - I thought - awful chick flick with my wife a few months ago in which the main character was supposed to be an editor for a publishing company. One of the (many) things that bugged me about the movie was that she kept writing the paragraph symbol incorrectly!
(As an aside, to be fair, my wife does not always pick terrible chick flicks; some even I have enjoyed.)
The paragraph symbol is ¶.
It is also called the pilcrow and has been around since at least the 1400s.
The heroine in the movie kept writing it as if it were a fancy P. But you'll note that it actually is written backwards relative to a P.
sadeyedartist didn't believe me at first, but it is not a P at all. It's actually derived from a C, according to most scholars.
Why from C?
Once again, it has to do with Latin.
The Latin for "chapter" is capitulum, and people used to write c to signify a paragraph. Over time, it came to have a vertical line drawn through it to distinguish it from a normal C. You can see how it could then evolve to the modern symbol.
(Now,… I only have four more entries to catch up with by biweekly quota….)
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I was watching an - I thought - awful chick flick with my wife a few months ago in which the main character was supposed to be an editor for a publishing company. One of the (many) things that bugged me about the movie was that she kept writing the paragraph symbol incorrectly!
(As an aside, to be fair, my wife does not always pick terrible chick flicks; some even I have enjoyed.)
The paragraph symbol is ¶.
It is also called the pilcrow and has been around since at least the 1400s.
The heroine in the movie kept writing it as if it were a fancy P. But you'll note that it actually is written backwards relative to a P.
sadeyedartist didn't believe me at first, but it is not a P at all. It's actually derived from a C, according to most scholars.
Why from C?
Once again, it has to do with Latin.
The Latin for "chapter" is capitulum, and people used to write c to signify a paragraph. Over time, it came to have a vertical line drawn through it to distinguish it from a normal C. You can see how it could then evolve to the modern symbol.
(Now,… I only have four more entries to catch up with by biweekly quota….)
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