What’s your sign, and how much does it weigh?

Currency symbols are almost invisible. We see them everywhere, but we rarely give them a thought, so let’s take a look at two of them.

Why is the symbol for the British pound sterling a stylized italic upper case L? It’s an abbreviated form of libra, Latin for pound or “pair of scales.” Libra is also the source of the abbreviation for the measurement lb.

Why is the dollar sign an S with one or two bisecting vertical rules? This all-American glyph is actually an immigrant. It comes to us from the Spanish peso. A stylized Ps, was an abbreviation for pesos in the New World. In English, it was first recorded in the 1770s in manuscripts and is seen in print in the early nineteenth century.

Again, a tip of the Textwrapper’s chapeau to the brilliant Humez brothers.

Yo, bang, it’s a screamer!

The etymology of the exclamation mark, according to the brilliant, amateur classicists, Alexander & Nicholas Humez in their book ABC et Cetera goes like this:

“…the exclamation point—a.k.a., ‘screamer’ or ‘bang’— is derived either from an abbreviation of Latin interiectiō (interjection) or else from the interjection Iō! (‘Hey!’).”

The morphology of the exclamation, as with the question mark, appears to boil down to the convenience of abbreviation. Medieval scribes stacked the i above the o, the o became a point, and thus evolved this indispensable, energetic punctuation mark.

Note: Avoid overuse.

Quaestio non disputata…

What is the etymology of the question mark ? It’s hard to imagine life without it, but, of course, there was a time when this useful punctuation was not available. Medieval scribes indicated a question by adding the interrogative quaestio to the end of what otherwise would have been a declarative sentence. It is widely believed that before the Renaissance invention of the upper and lower case, the repetitive writing of quaestio led to an abbreviated Qo, which then led to a stylized Q with a dot underneath.

Ligatures

Illustrated above are the five Latin ligatures. Some fonts offer more extensive ligature families.

The reason for ligatures is that the terminal on the lowercase f tends to run into the letters which follow it, so type designers created elegant solutions to the problem. In the digital age, with so many non-professionals setting type, these eyesores have reappeared.

Professional design programs offer automated substitutions of ligatures and many roman fonts offer, at the least, these five ligatures.

Ampersand…

The ampersand is a ligature, which combines e and t to form the Latin et, which means and. The array of typographic designs for the ampersand are wildly varied, but in most of them, one can still make out the e and the t.