If you don’t know me personally, then you might not know that I have been writing an essay on the terminology of typography which I plan to submit to Verbatim, an academic lexicographic quarterly. I’m as over-ambitious for this project as I have ever been for any project, so I am determined to create a humorous but thorough and perhaps even a profound work. A comic typographic Moby Dick, if you will.
    Last night I finished it. Or I went to bed thinking I had. But this morning I was bothered by an inkling of one last term, but one that I was not at all sure of. It involved a colon and a dash, and had something to do with two balls, and a prick. So I googled two balls and a prick. The results I were interesting, but I found no reference whatsoever to punctuation or typography.
    Then I googled punctuation and colon and I was onto something. Yes, the combination of a colon and a dash, which at one time was fairly common but has now been replaced by just the colon, is sometimes referred to, according to a post at a discussion group, as a colon-dash or a dog’s prick. A dog’s prick! But no, this gets stranger. The Partridge Dictionary of Slang, according to another person, defines a dog’s prick as typographic slang for an exclamation mark! Could it refer to both, I wondered?
    Well, no. According to the 1949 third edition of the Partridge Dictionary of Slang, “the typographical colon-dash (:—)” is sometimes referred to as dog’s ballocks. And the Oxford English Dictionary, in an online ‘draft revision’ dated July 2007, concurs:

“dog’s bollocks n. (also dog’s ballocks) Brit. coarse slang (a) Typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs (see quot. 1949) (rare); (b) (with the) the very best, the acme of excellence; cf. the cat’s whiskers at CAT n.1 13l, bee’s knee n. (b) at BEE n.1 5b.”

    The bee’s knee. How could I have possibly thought, last night, that the essay was complete.