Origin of the 'squigly line' used for quarter note rest?

Question

This has been driving me nuts - I can't find a single thing on the net that would indicate why the quarter rest is penned the way it is.Did it evolve from some initial or abbreviation or was it always a random scrawl?

Answer 1

Great question! Interestingly enough, our friend the quarter rest is derived from the "crochet" symbol, used in the 14th century. A line with a crook attached was called a "crochet" (pronounced just like the lace), which meant "crook", or a shepherd's staff (not a criminal). The French word for "crook" was also the etymological origin of the word for crochet needle, which is used to create crochet lace. I don't know exactly why this was assigned to the quarter rest, but one might speculate that it may have come from a common tie between the words "quarter" and "crochet."

Great question, considering what a P in the B the quarter rest is to draw. What would you suggest as a replacement, and why?

According to Wikipedia:

The note derives from the semiminima ('half minim') of mensural notation. The word "crotchet" comes from Old French crochet, meaning 'little hook', diminutive of croc, 'hook', because of the hook used on the note in black notation. However, because the hook appeared on the eighth note (or quaver) in the later white notation, the modern French term croche refers to an eighth note.^{[citation needed]} The quarter note is played for half the length of a half note and twice that of an eighth note. It is one beat in a bar of 4/4. The term "quarter note" is a calque (loan translation) of the German term Viertelnote. The names of this note (and rest) in many other languages are calqued from the same source; Romance languages usually use a term derived from the Latin negra meaning 'black': The Catalan, French, Galician, and Spanish names for the note (all of them meaning 'black') derive from the fact that the semiminima was the longest note to be colored in mensural white notation, which is true as well of the modern form. The Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Serbian and Slovak names mean "quarter" (for the note) and "quarter's pause" (for the rest).