Lest you think anyone around here has a life: at 10 p.m. on a Friday evening, a text exchange took place between two Geist editors:

After some investigation, and after checking with other literary-minded associates, it was discovered that an asterism is a stacked set of asterisks used to call attention to the text that follows it. Like this: ⁂ . (It’s also—according to “Big Blue,” what we around the Geist office affectionately call the Oxford Canadian Dictionary—a name for a group or cluster of stars. You may think the term for this is “constellation,” but that’s not quite accurate. Though the two terms are related, they are not synonyms, astronomically speaking.)

In any case, what M. was looking for was the word used to describe a set of asterisks laid out thusly *** and which are used to delineate a section break in a written work. Texts flew back and forth; research was conducted. Some time later, M. received a note from a musician friend about an article that appeared in the Paris Review in June 2018 regarding the “dinkus,” the true name for the series of three asterisks. From the piece on the dinkus by Daisy Alioto: “The dinkus has none of the asterism’s linguistic association with the cosmos, but that’s why I love it. Due to its proximity to the word dingus, which means, to define one ridiculous word with another, “doodad,” dinkus likely evolved from the Dutch and German ding, meaning “thing.” To the less continental ear, dinkus sounds slightly dirty, and I can confirm that it’s brought serious academics to giggles.”