❡

Where have all the pilcrows gone?

This fancy little symbol ❡ might not look like much to you, but it used to take up a lot of space and draw attention to every new beginning.

It’s called the Curved Stem Paragraph Sign Ornament, or Unicode U+2761.

It captured my attention when I was hunting for the ❦

❡ is historically noted as being mostly ornamental typographical embellishment to mark the beginning of a new paragraph, but it once had an enormous job to do. It’s a fancier version of the standard pilcrow ¶.

The pilcrow was a way to mark new lines in medieval manuscripts when writers wrote every page by hand. Consider that parchment was once wildly expensive, so a writer would want to maximize space on the page, using every inch. How would a reader know when a new paragraph began—through the fancy pilcrow, of course.

Uh-oh! Once moveable type entered the scene, the pilcrow was no longer essential. White space was left waiting for a rubricator to fill it with a pilcrow, but they couldn’t keep up, and eventually the rubricators were out of a job in favor of simply keeping more white space on the page.

Keith Houston has written about the pilcrow in his book Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, & Other Typographical Marks. And in his article “The imminent death of the paragraph.” If you have a thing for marganalia as I do, I’d highly recommend you check out his work.

He makes punctuation seem profound.

In the article, he notices something interesting. He asks, “…is the paragraph itself destined to die just as the mark that once delineated it has disappeared from sight?” In other words, are we so used to writing in shortened, snappy sentences that we can’t read entire paragraphs that appear on a screen?

Maybe.

See what I did there?

And again.

Little snippets of fragmented sentences filling in for whole paragraphs. Sure, the white space gives us a certain amount of clean breathing room while staring at a screen. But are we losing the ability to read longer passages because of it?

Many professors have been complaining that their students are no longer capable of reading entire books and have only been exposed to select passages in high school English classes.

What do you think?

Is our ability to only read brief blog-like passages a visual necessity?

Or should we be more concerned that we’re losing our ability to sustain reading for longer sittings?

I’d love to know what you think.

If you liked to learn more about the history of the pilcrow, you can read Claire M. L. Bourne’s paper Dramatic Pilcrow on JSTOR. It’s a fascinating read and includes some visual examples of the pilcrow at work. Just note, it’s 40 pages long. So, you may want to turn your attention to Stupid Little Genius, who gives us a condensed history of the pilcrow in just over two minutes.

Then ask yourself. What’s really competing for our reading attention?

Do you have any inquiries about marginalia? I’m always interested in new ways to investigate the written word. Leave a comment and let me know what intrigues you or perplexes you about punctuation.