"When empress, her prime duty had been to charm her subjects."
—Toby Faber, Fabergé's Eggs (2008)

"The magician's trademark 'top hat and tails' dates from Robert-Houdin."
—Michael Symes, Magic and Illusion

"Strength braces every nerve."
—The Philosophical Magazine, 1809

"The rebirth of the long-forgotten interrobang."
—William Saffire, Quoth the Maven

"He really got a kick out of the way that Numero phrased things. ... That sly devil sure is slick."
—Stephan R Hutchinson, A Trucker for President

"The sign & is said to be properly called Emperor’s hand, from having been first invented by some imperial personage, but by whom deponent saith not."
—William Shepard Walsh, Handy-book of Literary Curiosities (1892)

"If the world does not want it, the copyright is of 'no account.'"
—The Publisher's Weekly, 1888

Eye-in-the-wall don't look at me!
I wouldn't give you the Moon's degree.
—Delta: A Review of Arts, Life and Thought in the Netherlands

"The unprecedented run of that space 'chariot.'"
—Space World, 1971

"This will be the Signal tower, whose silhouette will be an impressive exclamation mark."
—Georges Binder, 101 of the World's Tallest Buildings

"And that blind paragraph mark with the curled tail!"
—Herbert Jones, Stanley Morison Displayed: An Examination of His Early Typographic Work

"The hierophant is therefore an expounder."
—Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie, The Message of Philo Judaeus of Alexandria

"A wheel of fortune (hereafter called the reference wheel)."
—Management Science, Vol. 24

The Tilde gives a letter a liquid sound.
—John Wilson, A Treatise on English Punctuation

"I slipped over to the gardens and to the Lover's section."
—Once Upon A Time In Berbice

"The Saints' days marked between brackets [ ], are not appointed by the Church."
—Charles Walker, A Prayer Book for the Young

"She sees the sun like a bullet."
—Sue Walker, The Critical Response to Flannery O'Connor

"For like a double dagger, it may stab both ways."
—Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, 1913

The asterisk "originated as the sign that an enraged Hera placed on Zeus's brow when he slept where he shouldn't to remind him when he gazed into the mirror that he should be somewhere else." —Sylvia Söderlind, Liminal Postmodernisms (1994)

"It means we have justice for all, for everyone. That is 100 percent."
—Congressional Record, Nov. 12, 2002, p. 28768