On the Dot
The Speck That Changed the World
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- 31,99 €
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- 31,99 €
Publisher Description
Despite the humble origins of its name (Anglo Saxon for "the speck at the head of a boil"), the dot has been one of the most versatile players in the history of written communication, to the point that it has become virtually indispensable. Now, in On the Dot, Alexander and Nicholas Humez offer a wide ranging, entertaining account of this much overlooked and minuscule linguistic sign.
The Humez brothers shed light on the dot in all its various forms. As a mark of punctuation, they show, it plays many roles--as sentence stopper, a constituent of the colon (a clause stopper), and the ellipsis (dot dot dot). In musical notation, it denotes "and a half." In computerese, it has several different functions (as in dot com, the marker between a file name and its extension, and in some slightly more arcane uses in programming languages). The dot also plays a number of roles in mathematics, including the notation of world currency (such as dollars dot cents), in Morse code (dots and dashes), and in the raised dots of Braille. And as the authors connect all these dots, they take readers on an engaging tour of the highways and byways of language, ranging from the history of the question mark and its lesser known offshoots the point d'ironie and the interrobang, to acronyms and backronyms, power point bullets and asterisks, emoticons and the "at-sign."
Playful, wide-ranging, and delightfully informative, On the Dot reveals how thoroughly the dot is embedded in our everyday world of words and ideas, acquiring a power inversely proportional to its diminutive size.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Usually overlooked, the dot is given star treatment by the Humez brothers, established writers on language (Latin for People), who cheerfully explore the dot's influence on language through history in this dense, tangent-filled book. Explaining that this is the "smallest meaningful symbol that one can make" with any writing or carving tool, the authors assert that the dot "has been one of the most versatile players in the history of human communication." Without it, Braille and Morse code would not exist; it would be harder to distinguish dollars from cents and hours from minutes; and music would have no half-beat. Even bullet points, the authors argue, are not unique to Power Point presentations but have been discovered in an ancient Egyptian tomb as the chief scribe of the tomb workers noted the completion of each vital task on his checklist. Ideal for etymologists and trivia buffs, this book covers an array of information and innovations on the relevance of this "speck," from the pre Dewey decimal library of Alexandria to the modern global culture of URLs, instant messaging and the music of Stevie Wonder.