I wouldn't sail this ship if I were you
1. The bose mark. Often mistaken for a full stop, the bose mark is in fact a tiny black dog nose. Its inclusion in text is used to indicate an almost irrepressible joy bubbling just beneath the surface.
2. Fake fly specks. Fly specks, which are relatively common in old books, are the feces and/or regurgitation marks of household flies. If you come into possession of a book that has spent time in a region with particularly intelligent or resourceful flies, however, you may also come across fake fly specks. These are pretty much what you might expect. Flies do not have a very sophisticated sense of humour, and find fake turds hilarious. You can detect fake fly specks by showing them to some flies and seeing if they giggle.
3. The secret mark of the Society of Stealth Chemists. This consists of a single, unremarkable full stop, printed in ink which has a distinctive and unusual isotopic signature. Although four or five of these are known to have been printed, the Society of Stealth Chemists prides itself on none ever having been found.
4. Quompons. These look like ellipses, but are in fact the result of incorrect insertion of punctuation into the text. This often comes about as a result of using too large or dense a font, or insufficient line spacing. As a result, the full stops cannot make their way to their designated places in time, and may be forced to queue to make it through any particularly constrained bottlenecks. These queues are known as quompons and may be of any length. They are particularly common in British documents.
5. The Smogadon. It has become customary among certain alien species, when writing in English text, to mark statements of unusual finality with a tiny or distant black hole rather than a full stop. For example, one might end the sentence ‘I would not go out with you if you were the last being on earth’ with a Smogadon. This obviously requires careful use of containment technology (in the 'distant’ case one requires a portal into space, pointed in the correct direction and with the right orientation to frame a suitably-chosen supermassive black hole). There are numerous cases of Smogadons exiting confinement. The result is usually a large explosion but in extreme cases whole planets have been lost. As a result, use of the Smogadon is discouraged by most style guides.
6. Gronking pats. These may be found in books that have lain closed for a long time. Letters are patient, but after a few hundred years unread they become restless, cranky, and sometimes horny. Gronking pats are small pieces of letters that have been chipped off by the letters fighting, fucking, or generally flinging themselves about the page with reckless abandon.
7. Exploding punctuation. There exist certain rare inks that can, when tapped with a pen, produce a small and localised explosion. Although less destructive than the Smogadon (q.v.), exploding punctuation is capable of causing injury and even death, and as such has been employed in a number of literary assassination attempts. It is responsible for at least three of the recorded cases of someone being literally unable to put a book down (in this case because the jolt from setting the book down on a surface might be enough to set it off).
