the.com/parenthesis
a whispered aside that pretends not to matter while quietly running the whole sentence
means a word, phrase, or clause inserted into a sentence as an explanatory or qualifying aside, usually marked off by the curved brackets ( ) that share its name
from From Greek parenthesis, literally "a putting in beside" — built from para- ("beside"), en- ("in"), and thesis ("a placing," from tithenai, "to put"). So the word describes its own job: something set down beside the main thought. It passed through Latin into 16th-century English, first naming the inserted phrase itself; the curved marks borrowed the name later, as the visible handles of that side-thought.
- name origin
- Greek for putting in beside
- comes in pairs
- an orphaned one haunts every coder forever
- original sin
- medieval scribes used slashes before curves arrived
- nesting trick
- math reads inner brackets outward first
- singular form
- one is technically a parenthesis, plural parentheses
lisp programming language — mccarthy 1958, uses nested parentheses as core syntax for all code
biblical commentary tradition — medieval jewish exegesis used parenthetical glosses extensively to explain torah