![]() Grafton's book does not mention asterisks, but the cover features one after the words "The Footnote." The matching asterisk at the bottom of the page reveals the subtitle: "A Curious History." "It looks a little cute, as punctuation marks go," Grafton conceded. While footnotes bestow an air of scholarly authority, even pedantry, to a written work, asterisks add an almost impish flavor. As a reviewer wrote of Conor Cruise O'Brien's 1993 biography of Edmund Burke, "The footnotes are as sharp as flick-knives." Then as now, numbered footnotes were used by writers to add commentary or cite sources - or settle old scores. The footnote, by contrast, didn't really get on its feet until the 18th century, Grafton said. You wouldn't change the text, but you'd indicate there was something wrong there, something more that needed to be said."Īsterisks were used in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament of the Bible, Grafton added, and in the Middle Ages the asterisk was all the rage: "They were signs to carry the reader from the text to commentary about the text and then back again." "In a classic text like Homer," Grafton says, "you had a symbol to indicate there was a problem with it. "Asterisks go back to Hellenistic Alexandria," said Anthony Grafton, the Princeton University history professor who wrote "The Footnote: A Curious History" (1997). (The word "asterisk" comes from "astrum," the Latin word for star note the mark's starlike shape.) While the asterisk seems as modern as night baseball, it's one of the most ancient and enduring of manuscript symbols, scholars say, stretching back much further in history than its typographical cousin, the footnote. ![]() "Perhaps we need to rethink this."Īsterisks are best known today in two realms: as appendages to sports statistics, and as substitutes for letters in profane words in an effort not to offend readers with delicate sensibilities ("*******!" she replied to her editor's suggestions.) The asterisk looks like a tick on the page and, fittingly, often seems to suck the lifeblood out of a bold, forthright statement by sly insinuation: "Let's not be too hasty," the asterisk implies. It's hard to love the asterisk, just as it's hard to love a smarty-pants showoff. " The asterisk is the elbow in the ribs, the wink, the smirk, the disclaimer, the qualification. ![]() As punctuation marks go, it's hard to top the asterisk - because the asterisk is there to top everything else. ![]()
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