On the dot

de Alexander Humez

Despite the humble origins of its name, the dot has been one of the most versatile players in the history of written communication. The Humez brothers shed light on the dot in all its various forms--as a mark of punctuation and a notation in mathematics and music--take readers on an engaging tour of the highways and byways of language, ranging from the history of the question mark and its lesser known offshoots the point dʹironie and the interrobang, to acronyms and backronyms, power point bullets and asterisks, emoticons and the "at-sign."