slash

Garson O'Toole adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM
Tue Sep 7 01:34:04 UTC 2010


 Jim Parish wrote
> SF writer Alfred Bester was using nonalphabetic characters in names even earlier; his
> _The Demolished Man_ (1953) featured characters named Duffy Wyg& and Sam @kins.
> (I thought there was one with a numeral in his/her name also, but a quick scan doesn't
> find one.)

Yes, Alfred Bester used the name "Jo 1/4 maine" in The Demolished Man.
Presumably the name is pronounced Jo Quartermaine.

Begin excerpt from chapter 6:

After the hall cleared, Powell examined the three men who remained
with him. Jo 1/4 maine was a heavy-set man, thick, solid, with a
shining bald head and a friendly blunt-featured face.

Typographically the one is 1 is slightly above the 4 and there is no
space before before "maine" in the paper edition I examined. I cannot
replicate this typography with simple ascii.

Garson

>
> Jim Parish
>
>> On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 3:49 PM, Garson O'Toole
>> <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> > Poster:       Garson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at GMAIL.COM>
>> > Subject:      Re: slash
>> > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> >
>> > On the topic of names containing characters that are not in the
>> > alphabet, I recall seeing the byline "Jennifer 8. Lee" in the New York
>> > Times. Here is a link to an archive of her articles and a Wikipedia
>> > link.
>> >
>> > http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/jennifer_8_lee/index.html
>> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee
>> >
>> > Michael Quinion spotted the name back in 2008 and wrote about it to
>> > the ADS list. There is additional discussion in the ADS archive.
>> >
>> > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0804A&L=ADS-L&P=R13105
>> >
>> > Garson
>> >
>> > On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 10:29 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>> >> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> >> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> >> Poster:       Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
>> >> Subject:      Re: slash
>> >> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> >>
>> >> On Sep 6, 2010, at 5:28 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>> >>
>> >>>
>> >>> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 8:07 AM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:
>> >>>>
>> >>>> Not the same topic, really, but this is still about vocalized (or "oralized") punctuation marks:
>> >>>>
>> >>>> One of my students insists that she attended high school with a girl who spelled her name
>> >>>> L--a and pronounced it "la dash ah" (the "dash" should appear as a solid line, probably).
>> >>>>
>> >>>> I shared the information about L--a with a friend who teaches in elementary school, and
>> >>>> she reported a similarly named student in her school:  K--a.
>> >>>
>> >>> I posted these links to Laura Wattenberg's three-part blog post last
>> >>> year, since "Ledasha" (+ variants) has come up here in the past:
>> >>>
>> >>> http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2009/10/ledasha-legends-and-race-part-one
>> >>> http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2009/10/ledasha-legends-and-race-part-two
>> >>> http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2009/10/ledasha-legends-and-race-part-three-of-three
>> >>
>> >> meanwhile, although the reports have been washing in for some time now, there's still no actual documentation.
>> >>
>> >> arnold
>> >>
>> >> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> >> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>> >>
>> >
>> > ------------------------------------------------------------
>> > The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>> >
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



More information about the Ads-l mailing list