A 1648 "smiley face"

[Ben Zimmer]

I've written up my skeptical take on the 1648 find for Slate's Lexicon
Valley blog (crediting Bonnie's work on EEBO):

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/04/15/emoticon_robert_herrick_s_17th_century_poem_to_fortune_does_not_contain.html


On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 11:12 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
> 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

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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