Bournemouth — Jan 17th 2017

9 members enjoyed an entertaining and informative - in equal measures - presentation by Euan Williams entitled "Of Squiggles and Marks (letters, points and punctuation), a whimsical talk". After demonstrating how punctuation can affect the meaning of a sentence, Euan followed by a brief review of modern punctuation marks. Euan explored emoticons, emoji and symbols through the macOS "Emoji & Symbols" and "Keyboard Viewer" menus. We learnt about glyphs & Unicode and he explored what we actually "read" when we are reading and how the brain can make sense of a jumble of letters providing the first and last letters of each word are correct - amazing stuff!

The invention and development of punctuation marks through Ancient Greek and Latin followed. After a short pause to watch Victor Borge's classic Phonetic Punctuation sketch, Charlemagne appeared and the beginning of uniform spelling and sentence and paragraph division. We considered Chaucer and Caxton's contributions. The European moveable type revolution started by Gutenberg came next, followed by the Venetian Aldus Manutius and his grandson. Martin Luther's German Bible represented the 16th C.

Euan followed this brief historical sketch by outlining interesting modern 'punctuation' marks. SMS & messaging slang and the use of emoji's were considered. We were left with the conundrum: if punctuation affects meaning, how will we cope with the increased use of visual symbols such as emojis that have no room for punctuation?

Following a refreshment break, a lively Q & A session ensued with several questions being related to Euan's talk.

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