As someone who assigned a keyboard shortcut to the interrobang (! + ?), I was happily to discover, via Keith Houston, another niche punctation: the quasiquote. Invented 82 years ago in a fanzine, the punctuation leveraged the ability to overstrike characters easily with a typewriter.

What I really love about it is how it introduces the idea of human fallibility into the myth of objective truth. Much of the work modern (post-WWII) journalism has been done to confirm the veracity of a quote. Anything words contained by quotation marks were words actually spoken (or at least presented legibly).

But what if you couldn’t capture the quote exactly, but were able to repeat it the gist of it accurately?

How would you treat that?

Most journalistic style guides say leave it unquoted. The quasiquote was invented to fix that. By combining a quote, and overstriking it with a hyphen, fanzines were able to share the essence of what was said in a way that kept the words flowing.

As zines (and everything else written) moved off of typewriters on to computers, the ability to overtype the punctation mark disappeared.

That said, Houston offered a path to its resurrection, and I was tempted to refine it further with more semantic markup.

Style rule:

<style>
	q { 
		quotes: "“" "”" "'" "'"; 
	}
	q.quasi::before, q.quasi::after  {
		text-decoration: from-font line-through;
		padding: 0 0.2rem;
	}
</style>

HTML usage:

<p>Ned Brooks demonstrated to Keith Houston 
<q class="quasi">the quasiquote wasn't a 
flash in the pan</q></p>

Rendered as:

Ned Brooks demonstrated to Keith Houston the quasiquote wasn't a flash in the pan