14 Punctuation Marks that You Never Knew Existed is a delightfully snarky introduction (introduce a snark punctuation mark here) to punctuation marks. Some of them I did not know existed and some of which I did not know the names.
My favorite is the snark, which is used to mark multiple meanings in a text and would be WONDERFUL for text messaging. Unfortunately I can not google how to make a snark with a Mac and find anything that actually shows the punctuation mark.
The one thing that I did think was funny totally, was the comment about the symbol the computer uses to mark paragraphs:
Most people will be familiar with it, though not with the fact that it’s called a Pilcrow. It’s also referred to as “The Blind P,” which sounds like a good name for some hopelessly twee indie band. “Pilcrow” is the Middle English word for “Paragraph.” You will never be able to use that fun fact in real life.
Ha! They don’t know us crazy English teachers, do they? I am going to use this one (and the snark) this next week in class.
I couldn’t get MSWord to show a pilcrow, but there is one on the toolbar or ribbon:
To make a Sarc Mark on a Mac, you need to go into (system preferences/language & text/ input sources) and click the box that says “Keyboard and Character Viewer.” This gives you a rectangular icon on the right side of the title bar. Then use that to “show character viewer.” The unicode for it is 2e2e and you can either search for it via that code, or choose to show all characters. It is the third from the last in the punctuation category. Now wasn’t that easy⸮