Description

For males or females INCLUDES Pendant and snake chain necklace in a USA-made jewelry gift box. You can also purchase just the pendant alone to use on your own cord or chain (select 0"). MEASUREMENTS The pendant is about .906" tall x .630" across x .051" thick (23mm x 16mm x 1.3mm) The necklace chain is offered in your choice of length from 16" to 50" (40cm to 127cm) MATERIALS The pendant is an antiqued silver zinc alloy casting. The necklace chain and all its components are made of pure 304 Stainless steel. Stainless steel is non-tarnishing, hypo-allergenic, shiny, strong and durable. You can sleep, swim or shower in it! ABOUT The question mark [ ? ] (also known as interrogation point, query, or eroteme in journalism) is a punctuation mark that indicates an interrogative clause or phrase in many languages. The question mark is not used for indirect questions. The question mark glyph is also often used in place of missing or unknown data. In Unicode, it is encoded at U+003F ? QUESTION MARK (HTML ?). Lynne Truss attributes an early form of the modern question mark in western language to Alcuin of York. Truss describes the punctus interrogativus of the late 8th century as, "a lightning flash, striking from right to left". (The punctuation system of Aelius Donatus, current through the Early Middle Ages, used only simple dots at various heights.) This earliest question mark was a decoration of one of these dots, with the "lightning flash" perhaps meant to denote intonation, and perhaps associated with early musical notation like neumes. Another possibility is that it was originally a tilde or titlo, as in " ·~ ", one of many wavy or more or less slanted marks used in medieval texts for denoting things such as abbreviations, which would later become various diacritics or ligatures. Over the next three centuries this pitch-defining element (if it ever existed) seems to have been forgotten, so that the Alcuinesque stroke-over-dot sign (with the stroke sometimes slightly curved) is often seen indifferently at the end of clauses, whether they embody a question or not. In the early 13th century, when the growth of communities of scholars (universities) in Paris and other major cities led to an expansion and streamlining of the book-production trade, punctuation was rationalized by assigning Alcuin's stroke-over-dot specifically to interrogatives; by this time the stroke was more sharply curved and can easily be recognized as the modern question mark. It has also been suggested that the glyph derives from the Latin quaestio meaning "question", which was abbreviated during the Middle Ages to qo. The lowercase q was written above the lowercase o, and this mark was transformed into the modern symbol. However, evidence of the actual use of the Q-over-o notation in medieval manuscripts is lacking; if anything, medieval forms of the upper component seem to be evolving towards the q-shape rather than away from it. According to a 2011 discovery by a Cambridge manuscript expert, Syriac was the first language to use a punctuation mark to indicate an interrogative sentence. The Syriac question mark has the form of a vertical double dot. In English, the question mark typically occurs at the end of a sentence, where it replaces the full stop (period). However, the question mark may also occur at the end of a clause or phrase, where it replaces the comma (see also question comma): Is it good in form? style? meaning? or: "Showing off for him, for all of them, not out of hubris—hubris? him? what did he have to be hubrid about?—but from mood and nervousness." —?Stanley Elkin. This is quite common in Spanish, where the use of bracketing question marks explicitly indicates the scope of interrogation. En el caso de que no puedas ir con ellos, ¿quieres ir con nosotros? ('In case you cannot go with them, would you like to go with us?') A question mark may also appear immediately after questionable data, such as dates: Genghis Khan (1162?–1227) The rhetorical question mark or percontation point was invented by Henry Denham in the 1580s and was used at the end of a rhetorical question; however, its use died out in the 17th century. It was later revived in modern-day society by Matt DiRoberto. It was the reverse of an ordinary question mark, so that instead of the main opening pointing back into the sentence, it opened away from it. This character can be represented using the reversed question mark (?) found in Unicode as U+2E2E. The percontation point is analogous to the irony mark, but those are even more rarely seen. Bracketed question marks can be used for rhetorical questions, for example Oh, really(?), in informal contexts such as closed captioning. For an ironic or sarcastic statement, a bracketed exclamation mark may be used: Oh, really(!). The question mark can also be used as a meta-sign to signal uncertainty regarding what precedes it. It is usually put between brackets: (?). The uncertainty may concern either a superficial level (such as unsure spelling), or a deeper truth (real meaning).