In his book, Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks, he looks into, well, the secret life of punctuation, symbols and other typographical marks. Software engineer and writer Keith Houston loves such symbols, too. These nearly ubiquitous icons and ideograms are immediately identifiable and may be vaguely understood, but their full meanings are known only to a select few equipped with specialized knowledge, and their origins are often lost to history. Here on Design Decoded, we love exploring the signs, symbols and codes embedded in everyday life. Somehow, the word transformed into the Middle English pylcrafte and eventually became the “pilcrow.” It originally comes from the Greek paragraphos( para, “beside” and graphein, “to write”), which led to the Old French paragraph, which evolved into pelagraphe and then pelagreffe. The derivation of its name is as complex as its form.
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