Quote:
Originally Posted by Brett Merkey
Suspecting that asterism was being used incorrectly, I looked it up:
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A traditional Asterism is a triangle of three stars.
⁂
The
* * *
Is a flat version, because typewriters and about 100 years later computers (and their printers) didn't have the ⁂ symbol.a
Aster means Star. This is an Asterisk *, a star.
Do read what I actually wrote. Some think a Dinkus is a synomyn for a "flat asterism", but it's any simple device that may be a scene break. Also carefully read what you look up!
Quote:
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Many variations of dinkuses are composed partially or entirely of asterisks, although other symbols can be used to achieve the same goals. Some examples include a series of dots, fleurons, asterisms, straight horizontal lines, and various other figures, such as infinity symbols. Esperanto Braille punctuation commonly uses a series of colons, ⠒⠒⠒, as a dinkus.
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—Further down the misleading Wikipedia article. References removed.
An ornate dinkus, if suggestive of foliage, is called a Fleuron (French).
The * * * has been accepted as a flat asterism since the 1870s (Commercial Typing Machines in 1874). A typewriter was originally the person whose job was to use a "Typing Machine". Actual typesetting was 400 years older in the west and much earlier in China.