fleurons and dingbats

A fleuron is a typographic element, or glyph, used either as a punctuation mark or as an ornament for typographic compositions.

Fleurons are stylized forms of flowers or leaves and the term derives from the Old French word floron, for flower.

Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style calls the forms "horticultural dingbats."

They are sometimes referred to as printers' flower, as an aldus leaf (after Italian Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius), hedera leaf ("ivy leaf"), or simply hedera symbol.

They are one of the oldest typographic ornaments. In early Greek and Latin texts, the hedera was used as an inline character to divide paragraphs.

It was also used to fill the white space that results from the indentation of the first line of a paragraph, or on a line by itself to divide paragraphs in a stylized way, to divide lists (as we ue "bullets") or for just pure ornamentation.

In more modern books, simple line breaks became more common as paragraph dividers. Fleurons became used more for ornamented borders.

Fleurons were made as with any typographic element as individual metal pieces that could be fit into the printer's compositions alongside letter and numbers. They made it easier to create ornamentation and these individual "sorts" could be used in multiples to make borders with repeating patterns of fleurons.

fleurons border of holly elements

One contemporary usage can be seen on menus that use a (red) printed chili-shaped fleuron next to an item to denote a dish that is particularly spicy.

❦ floral heart dingbat and rotated ones used as bullets for lists ❧  ☙ 

A dingbat is also an ornament or spacer used in typesetting, sometimes more formally known as a "printer's ornament."

However, Wikipedia lists for the purposes of disambiguation that the word can also refer to a number of other uses including: a slang term referring to someone silly (as often applied to the TV character Edith Bunker on the program All in the Family); as a board game requiring players to solve rebuses and known in America as Whatzit?; as a type of cheap urban apartment building built between the 1950s and 1960s; and as a paddle ball in South Africa, as well as other things.

The use of “dingbat” to mean “an ornamental item of type” appeared around 1921 and is probably based on an earlier use to describe “a nameless object.” The “ding” in dingbat is probably the Dutch word “ding,” meaning “thing.” (The slang word “dingus,” meaning  a“gadget or contraption" has the same origin.) And the “bat” goes back to the Old English "bat” which was “a cudgel or war club” much like our modern day sports bat. In Middle English, "bat" was  it was also used to mean simply a lump or left-over chunk of something, so a “dingbat,” would be the rather vague "bit of a thing.”

For our purposes in this post, a dingbat is a printer's ornament, character or spacer used in typesetting which can represent any number of things.

The term continues to be used in the computer industry to describe fonts that have symbols and shapes in the same way as alphabetical or numeric characters.

Some dingbats you might use digitally are:

✁

✂

✃

✄

☎

✆

✇

✈

✉

☛

☞

✌

✍

✎

✏

Unicode dingbats menu

Riding Shotgun

John Wayne riding shotgun in Stagecoach

Have you ever "called shotgun” to claim the front seat as a passenger in a car? This seems to be an Americanism for when one of multiple passengers wants the front seat rather than being cramped with a lousy view in back.

The usage has its roots in a bygone era of the American West when stagecoaches were common. At least in the retelling of American history through films and television, we learned that back in the 1880s the seat next to the driver on top was given to someone with a gun.

Though shotguns offered the chance to hit one or more attackers more easily from a bouncing seat, we also have seen on the screen men with rifles and pistols riding shotgun. The term became a generic way of describing the seat and the duty.

The phrase appears in the 1939 John Ford film Stagecoach starring John Wayne who declares that “I’m gonna ride shotgun.”  Randolph Scott starred in a 1954 film titled Riding Shotgun.

Though we hope no one today who calls shotgun when getting into a car is carrying a weapon, the term has survived in slang usage.  In the 21st century, riding shotgun might require monitoring the GPS and answering phone calls and text messages for the driver, which are jobs that might actually save the driver's life.

Hoosiers and other demonyms

I have posted here about eponyms, words that come from the name of a person, but there are also demonyms which are words that identify residents or natives of a particular place. The word is usually derived from the name of that particular place.

Simple examples of demonyms include Chinese, American and Mexican. In English, demonyms are capitalized and often the same as the adjectival form of the place, e.g. "Italian", "Japanese", "Greek," but this is not always the case. The adjective for Spain is "Spanish", but the demonym is "Spaniard."

Some groups of people may be referred to by multiple demonyms, such as natives of the United Kingdom who can be called British people, Brits, or Britons.

We commonly use  country-level demonyms - such as "French," but also use lower-level demonyms for residents of a region, state or city.  Someone from Nevada is a Nevadan, and from New Jersey is a New Jerseyan. A resident of San Francisco is a San Franciscan.

And then we have demonyms with more unusual origins. For example, a resident of Indiana is known as a Hoosier. The etymology is disputed, but the leading theory (via the Indiana Historical Bureau and the Indiana Historical Society) says that "Hoosier" originated in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee as a term for a backwoodsman, a rough countryman, or a country bumpkin

"Hoosier" was in general use by the 1840s,and the state adopted the nickname "The Hoosier State" in the mid-1800s.

The term shows up in the names of numerous Indiana-based businesses, organizations, and as the name of the Indiana University athletic teams.

Hoosiers is also the title of a popular 1986 film about a coach and his small town Indiana high school basketball team's unlikely run to a championship.