On the Dot The Speck That Changed the World |
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| Author:
| Humez, Alexander
Humez, Nicholas |
| ISBN: | 978-0-19-532499-0 |
| Publication Date: | Oct 2008 |
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press, Incorporated
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| Book Format: | Hardback |
| List Price: | USD $37.99 |
Book Description:
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In On the Dot, Alexander and Nicholas Humez offer a wide ranging, entertaining account of this much overlooked and minuscule linguistic sign. The Humez brothers shed light on the dot in all its various forms. As a mark of punctuation, they show, it plays many roles--as sentence stopper, a constituent of the colon, and the ellipsis (dot dot dot). In musical notation, it denotes "and a half." In computerese, it has several different functions (as in dot com and the marker between a file...
More DescriptionIn On the Dot, Alexander and Nicholas Humez offer a wide ranging, entertaining account of this much overlooked and minuscule linguistic sign. The Humez brothers shed light on the dot in all its various forms. As a mark of punctuation, they show, it plays many roles--as sentence stopper, a constituent of the colon, and the ellipsis (dot dot dot). In musical notation, it denotes "and a half." In computerese, it has several different functions (as in dot com and the marker between a file name and its extension). The dot also plays a number of roles in mathematics, in Morse code (dots and dashes), and in the raised dots of Braille.