A 1648 "smiley face"

[Joel S. Berson]

At 4/15/2014 05:12 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>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

Nice.  And hits the pertinent .. points.

Joel



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

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