Credo Reference Friday Brainteaser – Punctuation
This week’s brainteaser is about punctuation: those dots, dashes and symbols which help to clarify written or printed material.
1. What is the name for the punctuation mark after “oak” and “elm” in this sentence: “The forest abounds with oak, elm, and beech trees”?
2. What is the British phrase for the punctuation mark which is called a period in American English?
3. What is an interrobang?
4. What does a semicolon look like?
5. When a full stop is used as part of email and website addresses, how is it pronounced?
6. What name is given to the accent over the last letter of the Italian word pietà?
7. Which punctuation mark is used with a noun or pronoun to indicate possession or in a contraction to show where letters have been left out?
8. What name is given to a set of three dots (…) in text?
9. A cedilla is a mark which is put underneath which letter to show that the letter has the sound of s?
10. In the German language, what is the name for the sign formed of two dots printed above a vowel?
How did you do?
0 – 1 Mmmm, not exactly brilliant.
2 – 5 A reasonable stab.
6 – 8 A good showing. But there’s still room for improvement!
9 – 10 You really know your stuff. Well done!
Questions set by Tony Augarde (www.augardebooks.co.uk)
9 out of 10.
Never heard of an interrobang and it’s not provided by Microsoft Word!
In question 1. the first one is a comma and the second is an Oxford comma which is superfluous and discouraged in the better houses, unless needed for clarity and precision.
An interrobang is a non-standard punctuation mark which I confess to have never seen in any writing. It is considered poor style, down there with strings of exclamation marks or question marks.
What a pedant I am!!!!
What does it look like?
It looks rather like a cross between an exclamation point and a question mark – joined at the bottom.
An Oxford comma, or serial comma, is encouraged by the Chicago Manual of Style, among other style manuals of repute, and when I worked as a copyeditor for Penguin/Putnam it was required, even in light fiction. Only the press style manuals discourage it, supposedly for reasons of space in short newspaper columns. I think not using the serial comma is sloppy and leads to ambiguity. I associate it with grade school level grammar teaching and am appalled by how many people think it is not only preferable but the ony correct usage..
As a pedant, puzzle fan, and computer scientist, this week’s quiz was right up my alley. As usual, one question tripped me up: the one about the interrobang. The Unicode standard defines this symbol and zillions more. If your browser is set up to display UTF-8, you should see it here: ‽
Three of these questions are about diacritics, not punctuation.
SandraS – Word processors don’t provide characters. Fonts do.