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On Daring Fireball, John Gruber noticed something interesting about David Pogue’s New York Times review of the Surface Pro: what he calls “the use of bounding asterisks for emphasis around the coughs.” Pogue wrote:

For decades, Microsoft has subsisted on the milk of its two cash cows: Windows and Office. The company’s occasional ventures into hardware generally haven’t ended well: (*cough*) Zune, Kin Phone, Spot Watch (*cough*).

And the asterisks weren’t just in the online version of the Times article. Here it is in print (via Aaron Pressman):

By “emphasis” Gruber explains that he means “informing the reader of a shift in style or voice,” likening the use of bounding asterisks to “how foreign words are italicized in many publications and books.” He figured it was an “Internet-ism,” tracing its use to the need for a plain-text substitution for italicization or bolding.

But David Friedman pointed out on Twitter that one could use the Google Books Ngram Viewer to search for such strings as *cough* and *sigh*, because the Ngram corpus tokenizes asterisks along with other punctuation. A search reveals *cough* on the rise from around 1990 (fitting Gruber’s impression of the convention as an Internet-ism), but *sigh* actually starts showing up in the mid-’60s. Friedman chalked up the early use of *sigh* to the comic strip “Peanuts.” Charles Schulz made frequent use of sigh as an exclamation, especially by Charlie Brown, with the word bounded by star-shaped symbols (not quite asterisks).

Let’s take a look at the prehistory of *cough*-style asterisking in comic strips, and the more recent usage as a form of “cyberpragmatics.”

In comic strips of the early to mid-20th century, cartoonists often needed to represent expressive non-verbal noises in the characters’ speech balloons. This was typically done with the use of such words as sob, sniff, cough, hack, wheeze, gasp, gulp, choke, and gag. Such interjections came to be used as a form of onomatopoeia, alongside more directly onomatopoetic expressions like ahem, ugh, ooh, whew, and zzz. When they appeared in the comics, they typically followed the convention one would find in other print sources of the era: bounding by parentheses. Some examples (click images to embiggen):

(sniff) in “Mutt and Jeff” (6/8/1920)

(cough) in “Mutt and Jeff” (2/1/1936)

(sigh) in “Smitty” (4/17/1937)

(sigh!!) in “Li’l Abner” (6/9/1944)

(gasp!) and (choke!) in “Abbie an’ Slats” (4/24/1946)

(gulp) and (cough, cough) in “Smilin’ Jack” (11/30/1947)

(There’s also a (gasp!) from “Superman” in my 2007 Language Log post on “Exhausted grammar.”)

Sometimes other bracketing delimiters were used. Comic strips have been getting creative with typography since the early days — consider the rise of cursing characters or “obscenicons” (aka “grawlixes”), which I’ve traced back to 1902. The earliest example I’ve found so far of “Peanuts”-style starburst characters is in this “Li’l Abner” strip from Nov. 22, 1935, where they appear around gulp!:

Perhaps Schulz borrowed this stylization from “Li’l Abner.” Wha