| ☚ ☞ ☟ | |
|---|---|
Manicule | |
| In Unicode | U+261A ☚BLACK LEFT POINTING INDEX |
Themanicule,☛, is atypographic mark with the appearance of a hand with itsindex finger extending in apointing gesture. Originally used for handwrittenmarginal 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]
For most of its history, the mark has been inconsistently referred to by a variety of names. William H. Sherman, in the first dedicated study of the mark,[2] uses the termmanicule (from the Latin rootmanicula, meaning "little hand"), but also identifies 14[a] further names which have been used:
The last three Sherman labels erroneous, withindicule andmaniple being mishearings or conflations, andpilcrow properly referring to the paragraph mark,¶.[3]
The symbol originates in scribal tradition of the medieval and Renaissance period, appearing in the margin of manuscripts to mark corrections or notes. The earliest book known to include manicules is the 1086Domesday Book, where they are used for marginal annotations alongside other marks such asdaggers. The age of the annotations is not known, and they may date to later than the 11th century.[4]
Manicules are first known to appear in the 12th century in handwrittenmanuscripts in Spain,[5] and became common in the 14th and 15th centuries in Italy with some very elaborate with shading and artful cuffs.[6] Some were playful and elaborate, but others were as simple as "two squiggly strokes suggesting the barest sketch of a pointing hand" and thus quick to draw.[7]
After the popularization of theprinting press starting in the 1450s, the handwritten version continued in handwritten form as a means toannotate printed documents, eventually falling out of popularity by the nineteenth century.[1]
.jpg)
Early printers using a type representing the manicule included Mathias Huss and Johannes Schabeler in Lyons in their 1484 edition of Paulus Florentinus'sBreviarum totius juris canonici.[5] 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.[8]
In contrast with their handwritten use, early printed manicules appeared in the main text, pointing outward toward corresponding printed margin notes. Later, beginning in the sixteenth century,[9] the manicule came to be used as a decorative element on the title pages of books, alongside other so-called "dingbats" such as thefleuron (❦).[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, with somefingerposts having relief-printed or even fully three-dimensional physical manifestations of pointing hands.[10] TheUnited States Postal Service has also used a pointing hand as a graphical indicator for its "Return to Sender" stamp.
Its popularity declined toward the end of the nineteenth century, perhaps due to its oversaturation in advertising. By the 1890s, it was rarely used unless for ironic effect.[1] Sherman (2005) argues that as the symbols became standardized, they were no longer reflective of individuality in comparison to other writing, and this explains their diminished popularity.[11]
The typical use of the pointing hand is as abullet-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, orsententiae. In some cases,flower marks andasterisks were used for similar purposes. Less commonly, in earlier centuries the pointing hand acted as asection divider with apilcrow as paragraph divider; or more rarely as the paragraph divider itself.[12]
Some encyclopedias use it in articles tocross-reference, as in☞ other articles. It occasionally sees use in magazines and comic books to indicate to the reader that a story on the right-hand page continues onto the next.[citation needed]
In modern printing, it was used as a standard typographical symbol marking notes. The AmericanDictionary of Printing and Bookmaking (1894) treats it as the seventh in the standard sequence of footnote markers, following the paragraph sign (pilcrow).[13]
In linguistics, the symbol is used inoptimality theory tableaux to identify the optimal output in a candidate of generated possibilities from a given input.[14]
American science fiction writerKurt Vonnegut used the symbol as a form of margin on the first line of every paragraph in his novelBreakfast of Champions. The literary effect of this was to create separation between each paragraph, reinforcing thestream of consciousness style of the text.[citation needed]
American essayist and cultural criticH.L. Mencken, often credited with having first coined the aphorism, "When you point one finger, there are three fingers pointing back to you," is also reported to have used this symbol to convey this sentiment in shorthand, seen first in his telegrams as early as the 1920s.
Thomas Pynchon parodies this punctuation mark in his novelGravity's Rainbow by depicting amiddle finger, rather than an index finger, pointing at a line of text.[15]
An upward pointing hand is often used in themouse cursor ingraphical user interfaces (such as those inAdobe Acrobat andPhotoshop) to indicate an object that can be manipulated. The first is believed to be theXerox Star.[10] Many web browsers use an upward pointing hand cursor to indicate a clickablehyperlink.CSS 2.0 allows the "cursor" property to be set to "hand" or "pointer" to intentionally change the mouse cursor to this symbol when hovering over an object; "move" may produce a closed fisted hand. Manyvideo games made in the 1980s and '90s, primarily text-basedadventure games, also used these cursors.[citation needed]
Unicode (version 1.0, 1991) introduced six "pointing index" characters in theMiscellaneous Symbols block:
Unicode 6.0 (2010) included four more pointing hands inMiscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs:
Unicode 7.0 (2014) added several more indices to the Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs block, sourced from theWingdings 2 font:
Unicode 13.0 (2020) added a three-part index (🯁🯂🯃) in theSymbols for Legacy Computing block:
Five Unicode manicule characters areemoji, including one of those in Unicode 1.0 and all four introduced in Unicode 6.0.[16][17] All five havestandardized variants fortext and emoji presentation.[18]
| U+ | 261D | 1F446 | 1F447 | 1F448 | 1F449 |
| default presentation | text | emoji | emoji | emoji | emoji |
| base code point | ☝ | 👆 | 👇 | 👈 | 👉 |
| base+VS15 (text) | ☝︎ | 👆︎ | 👇︎ | 👈︎ | 👉︎ |
| base+VS16 (emoji) | ☝️ | 👆️ | 👇️ | 👈️ | 👉️ |
This type ornament has a long history, the printed outline of a hand being used as a paragraph mark by, among other early printers, Huss at Lyons in 1484 in the edition of Paulus Florentinus'sBreviarum totius juris canonici he printed with Johannes Schabeler. As with other typographic conventions this was taken from scribal practice, carefully drawn hands pointing to a new paragraph being found in early 12th century (Spanish) manuscripts. It is also known as a fist, hand, or index.
The standard sequence of reference marks was *, †, ‡, §, ‖, ¶, and ☞
