The Pilcrow

My friend sent me a link to a blog about shady characters, I was intrigued by the title, but once I actually started reading I was even more surprised about the content of the blog. I have always been a bit of a word nerd and liked the book 'Eats, shoot and leaves' which is about the decline of our modern day punctuation. So when the topic of shady characters was punctuation, I read on with interest. The blog was a three part story loosley focused on the story of the pilcrow, it takes many asides into the history of punctuation and the place of the pilcrow in punctuation. Now at this point you are probably asking yourself, what is a pilcrow? Most of you will know it as the mark in Microsoft Word, that when you turn on the hidden formatting symbols it marks the end of each paragraph. ¶

The story of the pilcrow and of punctuation in general is an interesting one. Back in the days of Ancient Greece, and later the days of Ancient Rome, punctuation was not used and words were written without spaces, with each word running into the next. Punctuation was first used to assist orators to read text aloud, rather than to assist readers to be able to read the text to themselves. It took many years after the first inception of punctuation, and a period where it fell into disuse, before what was to become modern day punctuation was born. 

The pilcrow was originally designed to be used to mark the beginning of paragraphs, not the end of them as it does nowadays in Microsoft Word. When writing a document, a writer would leave a blank space at the beginning and add the pilcrows in last. However due to deadlines being tight (yes tight deadlines have been around for a long time), often manuscripts would be published without the pilcrow, instead with just a blank space for the intended pilcrow. This practice gave birth to using indentation as the mark of a new paragraph, instead of the pilcrow, and was the reason for the pilcrow's fall into disuse. It has only now been revived with the creation of word processing programs, such as Microsoft Word, which have once again adopted the pilcrow as a paragraph mark.

This is a brief story of the pilcrow, I would recommend reading the full story on the Shady Characters blog, which covers many other facets of the history of punctuation in addition to the pilcrow.