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Manicule
Symbol depicting a pointing finger From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The manicule, ☞, is a typographic mark with the appearance of a hand with its index finger extending in a pointing gesture. Originally used for handwritten marginal notes, it later came to be used in printed works to draw the reader's attention to important text. Though once widespread, it is rarely used today, except as an occasional archaic novelty or on informal directional signs.[1]
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Terminology
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Throughout its history, the mark has been referred to by a variety of names.[2] When William H. Sherman wrote the first dedicated study of the symbol in his 2005 paper, "Towards a History of the Manicule",[3] he used the term manicule. It is derived from the Latin root manicula, meaning "little hand". Cognates of the term were common in Romance languages, but the English loanword manicule was largely restricted to manuscript scholarship prior to Sherman's paper. Sherman explains his decision not to use one of the various English terms because manicule describes the mark itself while many of the other terms describe one of its various functions. For example, Sherman writes that "fist has its origins in printers’ slang and should properly be restricted to the products of the printing press."[2]
Sherman lists 14 further names used for the symbol.[b] Three of the names are likely conflations with other terms: pilcrow, maniple, and indicule. The pilcrow is the paragraph mark, ¶. Maniple, according to literature scholar Theresa M. Krier, is either a misapplication of maniple, the cloth used by priests during Mass, or it is a combination of manicule with manciple. Sherman writes that indicule is likely a combination of indicator with manicule. He then lists the Latin indicationum and ten English terms for the manicule:[4]
- hand
- pointing hand
- hand director
- pointer
- digit
- fist
- mutton fist
- bishop's fist
- index
- indicator
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History
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Handwritten manicules
The symbol began as a form of marginalia that developed alongside books in their now-standard codex form.[5] One of the earliest forms of marginal commentary were scholia, or written notes in the margins of text, typically provided by the scribe who created the handwritten manuscript copy.[6] Three ancient Greek Homeric scholars—Zenodotus of Ephesus, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus of Samothrace—who were all librarians at the Library of Alexandria, successively developed a system of symbols to be used in the margins of Homer's poetry. Named after the obelus, which evolved into the modern dagger †, this system of marking up a text with a set of symbols for scholarly commentary became known as obelism.[7] Among these Aristarchian symbols, the ancora, an anchor-shaped pointer ⸔ or ⸕, was used to draw attention to a passage.[8]
The codex format for texts, introduced in the 4th century AD, was better suited to marginal notation than the continuous scrolls used in antiquity. While the pages on a scroll are written on the same long length of papyrus or parchment, a codex has physically separate pages bound at one edge. Their format is very similar to a modern book, although using vellum or parchment made from animal hides instead of paper.[1] Professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, Peter Stallybrass argues that the codex encouraged discontinuous reading of a text among readers who could easily flip between distant pages.[9]
The scroll as a technology depends upon a literal unwinding, in which the physical proximity of one moment in the narrative to another is both materially and symbolically significant. One cannot move easily back and forth between distant points on a scroll. But it is precisely such movement back and forth that the book permits. It not only allows for discontinuous reading; it encourages it.
— Peter Stallybrass, "Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible" (2002)[9]
In Europe, note-taking by readers and the related usage of the manicule peaked in the Renaissance.[1] It is difficult to say when the manicule first appeared because its usage was heavily tied to the act of reading. Renaissance owners of expensive manuscripts and of early printed books often extensively annotated the books they owned.[1] Many manuscripts and printed books from the period contain personal systems of marginal symbols and notes written by the book's reader, and some even have hand-written legends for the symbols and entire indexes appended to the book.[10]
The term index had a broader range of meaning in medieval and early Renaissance books.[11] The modern index, an alphabetic listing of topics printed at the back of a book, was not included in medieval manuscript books or the early printed books. Instead, readers would rely on a broad range of indices that they added to their own books, including marginalia, tables, lists, and bookmarks. The term index comes from the index finger which could be used by readers to physically mark one's place when cross-referencing different pages in a book.[12] A common type of marginal index was the nota bene, which translates literally "note well", where a written note would be placed in the margin and often directed to a part of the main text with a manicule.[13]
Johnson (1824)
Domesday (1086)
According to John Johnson's Typographia, Or The Printers' Instructor (1824), the manicule was one of many self-explanatory marginal symbols appearing in Domesday Book, completed in 1086.
The oldest book known to contain a manicule is the 1086 land survey, Domesday Book, but the age of the annotation is unknown and may date to later than the 11th century.[14] Domesday Book uses a range of symbols for marginal annotations including the manicule and other marks such as daggers.[14] Though the manicule was frequently used for centuries to annotate books by both copyists and readers, there was little written about the mark itself. Printer John Johnson's 1824 guide and history on typography, Typographia, Or The Printers' Instructor, lays out the book's various reference marks, such as the dagger, manicule, and asterisk as reference symbols that "in most instances explain themselves."[1]
Manicules appeared in 12th-century handwritten manuscripts in Spain,[15] and became common in 14th and 15th-century Italian manuscripts. Some were as simple as "two squiggly strokes suggesting the barest sketch of a pointing hand" and thus quick to draw, while others were playful and elaborate, with shading and artful cuffs.[16] Some have fingers lengthened and bent to point deep into the text. For example, a fourteenth-century manuscript of Cicero's Paradoxa Stoicorum includes manicules, that variously stretch out fingernails, bend their fingers to cover the full length of the page, are an octopus, or wield a snake.[17][18]
- Variety of manicules from a 14th-century manuscript
Nail
(p. 1)
Octopus
(p. 2)
Fingers
(p. 3)
Snake
(p. 4)
After the popularization of the printing press starting in the 1450s, the handwritten version continued in handwritten form as a means to annotate printed documents,[1] Some early print books contain both printed manicules from the publisher and handwritten manicules from readers highlighting different parts of the text.[19] Eventually, they fell out of popularity in the nineteenth century.[1]
In print
With the invention of movable type, the manicule was printed from its own metal type block as individual letters, numbers, and punctuation were.[20][21] Early printers used the manicule as a type of paragraph mark. For example, Mathias Huss and Johannes Schabeler used it in their 1484 edition of Paulus Florentinus's Breviarum totius juris canonici.[15] Writer John Boardley identifies the first appearance of a manicule in a printed book as an earlier 1479 edition of the same work, Breviarum totius juris canonici, printed in Milan by Leonhard Pachel and Ulrich Scinzenzeller, and using the same Gothic rotunda font.[22]
Much early print usage of the manicule continued the manuscript tradition of connecting the main text to marginal notes, but in a variety of nonstandard ways, such as pointing outward to the margin or combined with reference letters.[20]
From the sixteenth century onward, the manicule appeared frequently as a decorative element similar to the fleuron (❦).[23] It appeared on title pages of books, alongside other so-called "dingbats".[1]
The manicule attained a great degree of popularity in the nineteenth century, particularly in advertisements. At this time, they also became more visually diverse, with larger and more complex fists being created.[1] They were also widely used in signage, particularly in fingerposts.[24] The United States Postal Service has used a pointing hand as a graphical indicator for its "Return to Sender" stamp.[25]
Its popularity declined toward the end of the nineteenth century, perhaps due to its oversaturation in advertising. By the 1890s, it was used more often for ironic effect.[1] Sherman (2005) argues that as the symbols became standardised, they were no longer reflective of individuality in comparison to other writing, and this explains their diminished popularity.[26]
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Usage
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The typical use of the pointing hand is as a bullet-like symbol to direct the reader's attention to important text, having roughly the same meaning as the word "attention" or "note". It is used this way both by annotators and printers. Even in the first few centuries of use, it can be seen used to draw attention to specific text, such as a title (in some cases in the form of a row of manicules), inserted text, noteworthy passage, or sententiae. In some cases, flower marks and asterisks were used for similar purposes.[27]
Less commonly, in earlier centuries the pointing hand acted as a section divider with a pilcrow as paragraph divider; or more rarely as the paragraph divider itself.[27]
Print reference works, such as encyclopedias, have used various typographical elements such as bold text, small caps, and the manicule to indicate terms that can be cross-referenced, or looked up under another entry in the text. For example, instead of a hyperlink to another article, they might have the term formatted as ☞ hyperlink.[28] The cross-references and marginal notes in printed text served a linking function similar to what is seen in electronic hypertext,[29] and links in digital encyclopedias replaced in-text cross references.[30]
Footnotes, in addition to the more common number and letter superscript, are sometimes identified with an asterisk-dagger system. Beyond the well-known asterisk (*) and dagger (†), the order of later characters in these systems varies. Some systems include the pilcrow, or paragraph sign (¶) as a footnote marker.[31][7] The American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking (1894) advises the manicule as the seventh in the sequence of footnote markers, following the pilcrow.[32] Modern style guides advise numbered superscripts or doubling up the more common asterisk and dagger footnote markers rather than attempting to establish a common order up to the sixth and seventh typographic symbol. For example, the sixteenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style lists only four typographic footnote markers.[7]
The manicule has had several niche technical usages. In linguistics, the symbol is used in optimality theory tableaux to identify the optimal output in a candidate of generated possibilities from a given input.[33] The computer programming language Smalltalk-72 uses a number of special characters, including a right-pointing manicule used as a quotation mark.[34] The Lincoln Writer terminals designed around 1958 for the MIT Lincoln Laboratory's TX-2 computer used a character set which included a right-pointing manicule;[35] this was nicknamed the "Meta Hand".[36] One year later, the same character set was also installed in a Flexowriter intended for use with the TX-0 computer.[37]
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Computer cursor
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A similar pointing hand icon is used as a mouse cursor in many graphical user interfaces (such as those in Adobe Acrobat and Photoshop) to indicate an object that can be manipulated. The earliest known software release to use this cursor was Alan Kay's Smalltalk for the Xerox workstations. Those computers, like the Xerox Star, influenced the graphical user interface of Apple's Lisa and Macintosh desktop computers.[24] Apple themselves used a hand cursor to indicate a clickable hyperlink in their 1987 HyperCard software, a local hypertext framework developed by Bill Atkinson.[38] At Apple, graphic designer Susan Kare created a "clicker" icon similar to a manicule that influenced later cursors for hypertext as well as video games.[39][40] It became the standard way to represent links when it was adopted by the early web browsers in the 1990s.[41] Experimental author Shelley Jackson observed that while visually similar to a manicule, the often-gloved hand cursor serves not as a textual signpost but as an invitation to make users "encouraged by the image of the hand to feel that they were interacting directly, physically with the image on the screen."[39]
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Unicode
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Unicode (version 1.0, 1991) introduced six "pointing index" characters in the Miscellaneous Symbols block:
- U+261A ☚ BLACK LEFT POINTING INDEX
- U+261B ☛ BLACK RIGHT POINTING INDEX
- U+261C ☜ WHITE LEFT POINTING INDEX
- U+261D ☝︎ WHITE UP POINTING INDEX (with U+FE0E ︎ VARIATION SELECTOR-15 to assert text style [see § Emoji, below])
- U+261E ☞ WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX
- U+261F ☟ WHITE DOWN POINTING INDEX
Unicode 6.0 (2010) included four more pointing hands in Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs:
- U+1F446 👆 WHITE UP POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
- U+1F447 👇 WHITE DOWN POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
- U+1F448 👈 WHITE LEFT POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
- U+1F449 👉 WHITE RIGHT POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
Unicode 7.0 (2014) added several more indices to the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block, sourced from the Wingdings 2 font:
- U+1F597 🖗 WHITE DOWN POINTING LEFT HAND INDEX
- U+1F598 🖘 SIDEWAYS WHITE LEFT POINTING INDEX
- U+1F599 🖙 SIDEWAYS WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX
- U+1F59A 🖚 SIDEWAYS BLACK LEFT POINTING INDEX
- U+1F59B 🖛 SIDEWAYS BLACK RIGHT POINTING INDEX
- U+1F59C 🖜 BLACK LEFT POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
- U+1F59D 🖝 BLACK RIGHT POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
- U+1F59E 🖞 SIDEWAYS WHITE UP POINTING INDEX
- U+1F59F 🖟 SIDEWAYS WHITE DOWN POINTING INDEX
- U+1F5A0 🖠 SIDEWAYS BLACK UP POINTING INDEX
- U+1F5A1 🖡 SIDEWAYS BLACK DOWN POINTING INDEX
- U+1F5A2 🖢 BLACK UP POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
- U+1F5A3 🖣 BLACK DOWN POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
Unicode 13.0 (2020) added a three-part index (🯁🯂🯃) in the Symbols for Legacy Computing block:
- U+1FBC1 🯁 LEFT THIRD WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX
- U+1FBC2 🯂 MIDDLE THIRD WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX
- U+1FBC3 🯃 RIGHT THIRD WHITE RIGHT POINTING INDEX
Emoji
Five Unicode manicule characters are emoji, including one of those in Unicode 1.0 and all four introduced in Unicode 6.0.[42][43] All five have standardised variants for text and emoji presentation.[44]
| U+ | 261D | 1F446 | 1F447 | 1F448 | 1F449 |
| default presentation | text | emoji | emoji | emoji | emoji |
| base code point | ☝ | 👆 | 👇 | 👈 | 👉 |
| base+VS15 (text) | ☝︎ | 👆︎ | 👇︎ | 👈︎ | 👉︎ |
| base+VS16 (emoji) | ☝️ | 👆️ | 👇️ | 👈️ | 👉️ |
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Other examples
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See also
- U+23FF ⏿ OBSERVER EYE SYMBOL (Unicode Miscellaneous Technical#Block)
- Arrow (symbol) – Graphical symbol or pictogram used to point or indicate direction
- Hand (hieroglyph) – Egyptian hieroglyph
- Obelus – Historical annotation mark or symbol (text pointer with various meanings)
- V sign – Hand sign (victory, peace or insult)
Notes
References
Sources
External links
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