An otherwise ordinary bit of

research recently took me on a circuitous route through Web pages, a shelf

full of reference books, and appeals to trusted advisers who are always

just an e-mail away.

My copy of the 1880 U.S. Census

arrived last month, and I eagerly popped in the first CD to see if my

kin were in there. The credibility of a genealogical resource that trades

on accuracy took a hit almost at once when I discovered a table of symbols.

Certain information, it said, would be set off by << >> .

And << >> were

labeled "carrots."

Carrots? I know they're not

"carrots." I grabbed my well-worn dictionary but could not find

what we do call them. The little point ^ above the 6 on the keyboard is

a "carat," isn't it? Or is it "karat"? Hmmm.

Spelled either way, "karat"

means a unit of weight for precious stones. But its definition as a proofreading

symbol was omitted. Checked further in my rather vast collection of references,

to no avail. I'd have to contact my Trusted Advisers.

Trusted Adviser/Editor Dave

Hamrick was going to Alabama with SCUBA-gear on his knee and said his

mind was blank.

But Trusted Adviser Joan "Once

an English teacher, always an English teacher" Houghton wrote back

succinctly, "A 'caret' or ^ is the mark used at the point of an insertion."

Well, duh, anybody can look

things up when they spell them right.

And when I finally did that,

of course, I learned more than I expected to. I was reminded that ^ is

also called a circumflex and controls the pronunciation of certain vowels.

The term, however, is not exclusive to the ^ according to my Webster's,

but applies also to the tilde (~) and another little curved dooflickus

not appearing on my keyboard.

The sideways use of the caret

in math has forever meant < "smaller than" and > "larger

than." Their current use in electronic communication, as referring

to a previous e-mail or containing a URL is of relatively recent coin.

But if not "carets,"

what are they called? Returns are trickling in. A trusted adviser of T.

A. Hamrick, Genie McDonald, an editor who does technical stuff for Delta

Air Lines, told him they are called "angle brackets." I had

found the same on one Web site I found, but rejected it. "Angle brackets"

makes me think of hardware.

Found another Web site that

calls [ and ] just plain "brackets," and that { these } are

"braces." This source also subscribes to the "angle brackets"

theory, but became suspect to me when I noticed that they favored British

terms.

I've always deferred to the

Brits where our mother tongue is concerned ­ they invented it, after

all ­ but I draw the line at calling quotation marks "inverted

commas" and periods "full stops." A full stop may be a

useful traffic or music term, but lacks something when used for "period."

Imagine saying to your whining preadolescent, "You're not going to

a R-rated film with your friends, full stop."

Still, "angle brackets"

seems to have won consensus.

As usual, I got caught up in

the history of punctuation and counted it time well spent. Greek text,

it seems, was written in blocks in which you read a line left to right,

drop to the end of the next line and read it to the left, then the next

from left to right again, and so on. An illustration, using English words,

comes from a 1990 article by Judith Stone:

THREE BLIND MICE

ECIM DNILB EERHT

SEE HOW THEY RUN

NUR YEHT WOH EES

A lack of punctuation may have

been the least of their problems: Sometimes there were not even spaces

between words.

The earliest punctuation was

attributed to a third century B.C. Alexandrian librarian named Aristophanes

(not the playwright) who came up with commas, colons and periods. But

in the absence of printing and the consistency that it fostered, his invention

did not catch on for quite some time.

He did somewhat better with

his system of dots used to separate words into groups to indicate where

a person reading aloud should pause for emphasis. A Roman scribe adopted

that system for his writings. He called the dots " puncti ,"

or "points, from which we get the word "punctuation."

In any case, until about the

ninth century, punctuation was used irregularly, if at all. Around the

11 th century, hyphens were introduced to indicate that a word

was continued on the next line, although not necessarily between syllables.

Early punctuation was based

more on the spoken word than on the printed word. After the invention

of printing, grammarians took over and it came to be related to sentence

structure rather than sound alone.

English punctuation was well

established by the end of the 18 th century, but is still not

fixed in stone. Like language itself, albeit more slowly, punctuation

changes.

The last known intentional

addition to the inventory was attempted in 1962, and was no doubt fended

off by the diligence of editors who turn apoplectic over plain old exclamation

points.

If I have to accept "angle

brackets," you'd think they'd have admitted the ill-fated interrobang.

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