A 1648 "smiley face"

Tue Apr 15 15:12:42 UTC 2014

That was a quick follow-up to my thought!  2014 smiley face.

Joel

At 4/15/2014 11:01 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 10:16 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> >
> > So I wonder whether placing "pausing" punctuation -- comma in the
> > Hawthorne example, colon in Herrick -- before a closing parenthesis
> > was simply a common style in the former days of profuse punctuation
> > marks.
>
>I asked Benjamin Schmidt, a digital humanities scholar and topnotch
>corpus-wrangler, if it would be possible to find other examples of a
>colon followed by a closing parenthesis in a historical corpus that
>tokenizes punctuation. He did a quick check on pre-1700 books on the
>Internet Archive and found that most results were OCR errors, but
>plenty were just ordinary punctuation. A few examples:
>
>http://archive.org/stream/plainscripturepr01baxt#page/62/mode/2up/search/Anon
>http://archive.org/stream/sylvasylvarumorn00baco#page/58/mode/2up/search/%22the+reft%22
>http://archive.org/stream/vitaeselectoruma00bate#page/308/mode/2up/search/%22verba+ejus+manifefte%22
>
>--bgz
>
>--
>Ben Zimmer
>http://benzimmer.com/
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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