Hedera, Manicule, and Interrobang: a bit of trivia

Tweet

I've used two of the three mentioned in the title of this post and yet I had no idea what they were called. Generally they're called glyphs. The hedera, also known as a fleuron, the center image in the photo for this post, has been used to indicate paragraph breaks. I haven't used the hedera, but the manicule (from the Latin root manus for "hand" and manicula for "little hand" and seen in the image) and the interrobang, yes. The interrobang can almost be figured out from its name. It's a question mark combined with an exclamation point, as in "You did what?!" The typographic symbol combines the two, with the exclamation point entering the question mark from top at midpoint and travelling through to end at the shared dot at the bottom. There are other glyphs, too, but enough is enough.