This morning I drove my kid to the bus stop, like I do every morning. It’s not because he can’t walk the however many blocks there – he walks back from the stop after school – but more that getting him to get there on time on foot has proven to be an impossibility on par with perpetual motion. So I drive him there. This morning, the bus didn’t show up, so I had to drive him to school, knowing that I hadn’t written a Cold Start the night before, and I had no idea what I was going to write today. But then inspiration came, as always, from the back of a Ford Bronco.

The inspiration from the rear of that Bronco came from the taillights, because as we all know, taillights are a constant source of inspiration. Specifically, the rear indicators on the current-gen Bronco – which are thankfully amber – appear to be in the shape of curly brackets.

You know, these things:

{ }

Seriously, look at them:

I mean, that absolutely looks like a curly bracket. They’re sort of oddly ornate for the Bronco’s overall aesthetic (I’d have assumed if Bronco rear indicators looked like any type of bracket, it’d be the square ones [ ]) but I do appreciate that bit of directionality in there, with that little hyphen-shaped middle bit pointing the direction. But there’s no question these indicators look like { }.

So, let’s talk a bit about curly brackets! I think for most people, they’re just kind of weird and rarely used, just hanging out there on the keyboard, seeming like a pair of parentheses that are just trying too hard. But curly brackets have all sorts of really specific uses!

Curly brackets likely exist on your computer keyboard at all because of the work of one man, Bob Bemer, who incorporated them into the character set of the IBM 7030 of 1961, also known as “Stretch,” which was the first transistorized supercomputer and the fastest computer in the world in 1961. This was the first machine to have an 8-bit byte which freed up room in the character set for more characters, including the curly brackets.

According to the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP stylebook, here’s how curly brackets are used:

“Braces ({}), also called curly brackets, provide yet another option for enclosing data and are used in various ways in ceratin programming languages. They are also used in mathematical and other specialized writing (see, e.g., 12.28). Braces are not interchangeable with parentheses or brackets.”

As you can see, these are also called “braces,” usually in British Commonwealth English-speaking places, like the inside of Matt Berry’s head. We’ll save the programming language part for a bit later, but in normal, prose English, it seems curly brackets are most often used to differentiate an example of something from the rest of the body text. An example might be

“There is one well-established and proven way to double the resale value of a Yugo {fill it up with gas}.”

There are, of course, other ways to cite examples in texts, but it looks like curly brackets can definitely fill that role.

In mathematics, curly brackets denote sets, which are just any collection of mathematical objects that form a group:

{1,2,x,11,42,8,6,7,5,3,0,9…}

As noted before, curly brackets are used in many programming languages, and there’s even a whole category of programming languages that use curly brackets called “curly bracket (or curly brace) languages.” Some very common languages like Java and C++ fit in this category, because their code uses curly brackets extensively to denote beginnings and ends of code blocks:

public void flagTest()
{
  boolean flag = true;
  int i = 10;
  if (flag == true)
  {
    for( int i=0; i<10; i++ ) 
	{
	   System.out.print("flag sure seems true");
	}
  }
  flag = false;
}

Sticking to computer stuff, we may as well note that the Unicode for { is U+007B and } is U+007D, while the old ASCII values for them are:

In music, they’re used to group two clefs on a musical staff should be connected and played together, sometimes specifying what instrument should play them together:

There was also an archaic chemistry use of the curly brackets to show molecules, but we now just use a subscript number. For example look at these two ways to show the molecule that makes up water, with two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen:

Sometimes you see oversized curly brackets used to connect lines of text together or, informally in handwritten contexts, just group any set of vertically-stacked things into one category; the unique shape of the curly bracket, which includes a collecting element and a pointing element, makes them unusually well-suited to this task:

I’m sure there’s more to curly brackets and their history and use, but for the moment, I’m just happy to see them celebrated on the rears of Broncos all over the place, encouraging people to consider these hardworking and largely under-appreciated bits of punctuation.