Comments on: The cyberpragmatics of bounding asterisks

By: Azimuth

Azimuth — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 03:19:02 +0000

"I know that I wish there were a widely recognized paraphrase mark. *sigh*"

I was just reading someone else who said, like, the same thing.

By: V

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 23:09:43 +0000

Bulgarian has something similar to the German, but I think it predates the Internet, although I think it's still pretty recent.

By: Warsaw Will

Warsaw Will — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 18:57:33 +0000

@Roger C and Faldone. Thanks, I'd missed that. British newspapers don't seem to use this sort of capitalisation, so I guess I'm just not used to seeing it punctuated. And you're quite right about the grammar, Faldone – these are two headlines from today's NYT:

After Ron Paul, Then What?
Fuel Is Fast, but Fealty Is Forever

By: Faldone

Faldone — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 13:16:02 +0000

@Rodger C: That's Because There Are No Prepositions, Conjunctions, or Definite Articles in the Headline.

By: Wim Scherpenisse

Wim Scherpenisse — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 19:00:41 +0000

@naddy For the record, in Dutch it's exactly the same as in German: verb stem without any ending. (In Dutch, this is identical to the inflected form for the 1st person singular as well as the imperative.)

By: Rodger C

Rodger C — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 17:51:10 +0000

Well, Every Word In The Headline Has a Capital, Except For Some Reason The Word a.

By: Lauren Collister

Lauren Collister — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 17:44:31 +0000

Excellent post, it's fascinating to learn about the history of this use of *. I've been interested in the uses of * for a long time, and even wrote a short squib about the use of * as a repair morpheme in my dissertation data.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378216610003152
I wish I'd had this robust discussion of the history of * when I wrote that!

By: Warsaw Will

Warsaw Will — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 15:38:06 +0000

I can't see that anyone's mentioned it, but what stood out for me was the capital letter after the comma in the headline. And it's in both the print and online editions. Strange.

By: Lynne

Lynne — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 07:46:05 +0000

As I read this NYT passage I 'heard' the bracketed phrase in what I will now call the 'Top Gun Cough'.

After reading @Alexander Pensky I was thinking back as far as maybe Seinfeld, but I think @Pete Mitchell has got it.

I would probably have dozens of chat logs where my friends have used it that way. The logs mirror a *cough* bullshit *cough* verbal style.

By: David Morris

David Morris — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 05:06:58 +0000

A friend of mine has just managed expressive asterisks quasi in a foreign language in a Facebook post (and later in the same post emphatic asterisks):

"[Friend 1] the traffic today is almost intolerable …
[Friend 2] Oh honey! You poor thing! Is it because of the trackwork? [rail repairs which shut down all the trains in the city centre, resulting in extra road traffic]
[Friend 1] It must be… *le sigh* "

By: J Mankin

J Mankin — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 23:48:20 +0000

I was writing script-style stories in notebooks with school friends in the late '90s/early 00s using asterisks like this for actions, sometimes long extended descriptions of actions. I believe we learned it from messageboard-based role-playing games and adapted it for our own use on paper. I remember very clearly realizing that I'd been spending too much time online when I was writing in one of these notebooks and accidentally wrote a small superscripted 8 instead of an asterisk–a typing error in writing. I suppose I just forgot to press "Shift" in my head…

By: Bob Ladd

Bob Ladd — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 21:18:20 +0000

Italian has not come up with something like the German Inflektiv – instead, Italian comics frequently use English words like gulp and sigh, untranslated, and probably often pronounced as if they were Italian. This usage predates the rapid recent spread of English among people of comic-reading age. Perhaps for that reason, there seem to be only a few of these, whereas the German Inflektiv is incredibly productive.

By: Andy Averill

Andy Averill — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 20:27:21 +0000

Bounding asterisks — OK, I get it now. I was picturing them bounding across a field.

By: maidhc

maidhc — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 20:11:28 +0000

(* *) are comments in some programming languages (Modula, I think).

By: Dan M.

Dan M. — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 19:46:35 +0000

I actually misacquired this usage and still haven't trained myself to use the standard third-person inflection. I instead always right these as imperative (*raise hand* instead of *raises hand*) because I thought the syntax was the same as you used in Zork when having your avatar do something.