From Shady Characters:
The asterisk is old. Really old. Granted, it is not 5,000 years old, as Robert Bringhurst claims in the otherwise impeccable Elements of Typographic Style1 (Bringhurst confuses it with a star-like cuneiform mark that represents “deity” or “heaven”2), but it has more than two millennia under its belt nonetheless. I go into greater detail in the Shady Characters book, but the abridged version of the asterisk’s origin story goes something like this.
In the third century BCE, at Alexandria in Egypt, a librarian named Zenodotus was was struggling to edit the works of Homer into something approaching their original form. I say a librarian, but really Zenodotus was the librarian, the first in a long line to be employed at Alexandria by the Ptolemaic pharaohs.3 Many spurious additions, deletions and alterations had been made to the Odyssey and Iliad since the time of their composition, but Zenodotus lacked the tools to deal with them. As such, he started drawing a short dash (—) in the margin beside each line he considered to be superfluous, and, in doing so, inaugurated the field of literary criticism.4 Named the obelos, or “roasting spit”, in the seventh century Isidore of Seville captured the essence of Zenodotus’s mark when he wrote that “like an arrow, it slays the superfluous and pierces the false”.5
The asterisk, in turn, was created by one of Zenodotus’s successors. In the second century BCE, Aristarchus of Samothrace introduced an array of new critical symbols: the diple (>) called out noteworthy features in the text; the diple periestigmene (⸖) marked lines where Aristarchus disagreed with Zenodotus’s edits; and, finally, the asteriskos (※), or “little star”, denoted duplicate lines.6,7 Occasionally, Aristarchus paired an asterisk and obelus to indicate lines that belonged elsewhere in the poem.8
Thus the asterisk was born. And right from the beginning, it came with a warning: a text with an asterisk attached to it is not the whole story.
Having survived the intervening millennia with its visual form largely intact, by the medieval period the asterisk had moved into a new role as an “anchor” for readers’ notes: where a reader wanted to link a note scribbled in the margin to a particular passage in the text, a pair of asterisks would do the trick. Later, in printed books, authors used the asterisk to call out their own asides.9
By the twentieth century, the asterisk had become the de facto leader of the footnote clan. In 1953, a lexicographer named Eric Partridge explained that “the following are often used”: ‘*’, ‘†’, ‘**’, ‘‡’ or ‘††’, ‘***’ or ‘⁂’ or ‘⁂’, and finally ‘†††’.10 Things have calmed down a little since Partridge’s time, but ‘*’, ‘†’, and ‘‡’ are still relatively common and even ‘§’, ‘||’ and ‘¶’ appear on occasion. Should a writer’s penchant for footnotes extend past five or six per page, lettered or numbered notes may be a better option and, indeed, the frequency of typographic footnote markers does seem to have waned over the past few decades.
Yet even as the asterisk is used less often as a footnote marker, its implied meaning — that there is more here than meets the eye — is as strong as ever. For American newspapers, merely to use the word “asterisk” is to tarnish its subject by association; for American sports writers, doubly so....
....MUCH MORE
