Punctuation that failed to make its mark

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151104-punctuation-that-failed-to-make-its-mark

by ZeljkoS • 8 years ago

52 54 8 years ago

bbc.com

akavel• 8 years ago

This made me think that smileys & emoticons are actually the new generation of punctuation marks :P

k__• 8 years ago

As much as there are right now, they may as well be the western Kanji

raxxorrax• 8 years ago

Some languages already have perfectly fine smileys as part of their alphabet.

Case in point: Ü (works better with sans-serif fonts but doesn't it look happy?)

crankylinuxuser• 8 years ago

I'd posit the idea that we primarily use the punctuation that we find on the keyboard of the device we use.

On Windows/Linux, I use a 101 key. We all know the symbols. And those are the ones I use. There are cases in which I can use an interrobang or kanji-related emoticons, but I'm doing a google search and copying and pasting. But long story short, I don't use these other symbols because they're not easily available.

Sure, I could remap my keys, at least on Xorg. (No clue how to do that on Windows. ) But then, those symbols just aren't used. It's also a reason I don't bother with APL, because the language uses dozens of characters that aren't normally on a keyboard. I'll mess with ones I can type.

Now, phones... Oh my. A phone will auto-substitute picture emoticons from things like :D . Technically, these are a Unicode character set with device implementations. It means even though the pic is a 32x32, it's only usually 2 bytes (unicode is fucky, urgh, so many bugs). I'm more leery in using unicode because of character handling and badness, but things seem to be moving that general direction.

But for the wider issue of Unicode, these "failed symbols" are right in there. But good luck exploring and finding them, since characters can be from 1-6 bytes, or 2^48 space... Alas, back to searching google and copying and pasting.

jfk132• 8 years ago

these "failed symbols" are right in there

The interrobang and a few other "novel" punctuation marks are there, but many of the examples from the article haven't made it that far, AFAIK. (And probably never will.)

characters can be from 1-6 bytes, or 2^48 space

It's a minor detail, but Unicode characters are limited to the range U+0000..U+10FFFF, so they fit in 21 bits and require no more than four bytes (in the UTF-8 encoding form) or two 16-bit code units (in UTF-16) in the usual string representations.

(No argument with your original statement regarding what we primarily use, anyhow!)

vorg• 8 years ago

Unicode characters are limited to the range U+0000..U+10FFFF, so they fit in 21 bits and require no more than four bytes (in the UTF-8 encoding form) or two 16-bit code units (in UTF-16)

The private use planes U+F8000..U+FFFFF and U+100000..U+10FFFF can be used as the high and low surrogate ranges in a surrogate-pair encoding scheme similar to that of UTF-16. That would give a range of U+00000000..U+7FFFFFFF, which is in 2^31 space. If the Unicode Consortium removed their arbitrary upper limit of U+10FFFF for codepoints, the UTF-8 and UTF-32 schemes as presently defined would naturally fit into this space without needing to use any surrogation. Only UTF-16 would require any surrogation -- its present scheme and those private use planes for a 2nd tier -- but hopefully the use of UTF-16 would be well on its way out by then.

ghaff2• 8 years ago

Primarily.

The major exception for me is em-dashes, which I use all the time.

There are also a few punctuation marks on a standard keyboard that don't get used very much outside of programming and other specialized contexts. {}\|

Another interesting thing related to punctuation is that the use of some punctation is really overloaded. Quotation marks in particular can mean literally quoting someone, a scare quote, an indication that something is a term of art, titles of certain types of works, and probably some other variants.

KozmoNau7• 8 years ago

On some keyboard layouts (including Danish, which I use), we also have the ¤ on shift-4.

Nobody I know has ever used ¤ in any context at all, it seems like such an odd addition. I've used it sometimes as a footnote marker, since it's highly unlikely to clash with formatting, unlike an asterisk.

lainga2• 8 years ago

In 2001, a blogger named Tara Liloia wrote that sarcastic sentences should be ended with a tilde (~)

Oh, how far you have fallen, tilde.

autokad• 8 years ago

i use it to denote a lasting sound. like heeey = hey~

Jedd2• 8 years ago

i use it to denote a lasting sound. like heeey = hey~

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic.

Anyway, it has a legitimate meaning already, so this usage may confuse your reader(s). It's probably faster to type heeey anyway. ; )

mindcrime• 8 years ago

It only just now occurred to me that I have absolutely no idea what the tilde was originally for. I only know it as a shortcut for "user's home dir". I'm sure it must have had some kind of pre-computer use, but I can't even imagine what it might have been.

I guess I could check Wikipedia, but I almost don't want to know. Like, finding out would take some of the mystery out of the world‽

ghaff2• 8 years ago

There's a long history as both an accent and a standalone mark.

In English, it basically means approximately especially in the context of numbers--a meaning that carries over into certain technical uses as well.

Doxin• 8 years ago

My wild guess would be that it started as a composition character on typewriters to write things such as ã.

For those unfamiliar with how accents work on a typewriter: There'd be a couple special accent marks such as ~ and ` and whatnot that'd put down their accent but not advance the carriage. You could then hit a letter to get e.g. à or ē. It's a pretty clever system to prevent having to have a key for every accent.

Jedd2• 8 years ago

I frequently use the ~ in front of numbers or words to denote some fuzziness about their accuracy.

It's a tremendously handy symbol for this purpose, as it otherwise requires a lot more thought or typing to get across a similar meaning (eg. even one or two 'approximately's or 'roughly's will rapidly reduce readability).

Denoting sarcasm would be a retrograde step -- part of the thrill & delight of being sarcastic is that the target is oblivious to it. One worry would be that accidentally inserting a single character (which already has a well understood meaning for the literate amongst us) becomes quite a big risk if it changes the entire tone of the preceding sentence / paragraph / thought. Plus of course there's the risk of rapidly escalating double-bluffs. Would ~~ be unsarcastic, or doubleplussarcastic?

duxup• 8 years ago

I will do that as well.

themodelplumber• 8 years ago

These are great. And they are expressions of type: "This is a different type of thing from a !. This type of thing is a (string of words that is represented by the new punctuation mark)".

Expressions of type give us new technology and increased leverage: We can further our inquiries because we can communicate those inquiries more objectively (i.e. more easily cross the subjectivity barrier). This objectified information is now information-technology-tooling. Though subtle, the use of these tools can eventually lead to new learning experiences and highly refined and promising new fields of work.

One of my current areas of interest is not so much punctuation, but what I call type-marks. These are unique markers that communicate the type of information that follows, or what is meant to be done with it. I find it's best if these symbols already exist in unicode tables. An example from bullet journaling is the hollow, upward-pointing triangle, which represents a meeting or event. I use other type-marks to indicate things like potential new models or leverage points in new models that may lead to useful new technologies. I use U+2295 or &oplus for that one in particular.

Anyway thanks to OP for posting the article--I love stuff like this.

nsxwolf• 8 years ago

Interrobang survived, not as its own symbol, but in ?! form.

hinkley• 8 years ago

Are you sure‽

jejones3141• 8 years ago

U+203D is interrobang.

Jaxan• 8 years ago

But in what order should they come!?

jfk132• 8 years ago

Isn't it obvious?!

kaushalmodi2• 8 years ago

This article is from 2015.

So does the posting of this have anything to do with the recent Interrobang episode on the 99% Invisible podcast‽

(99pi is an awesome podcast btw!).

After listening to this episode, I even added a binding to the "C-x 8" map in Emacs[0]. This key map is mainly used for inserting various Unicode characters. So now in my Emacs, "C-x 8 ?" inserts ‽.

[0] https://github.com/kaushalmodi/.emacs.d/commit/a70dd6b7c39f0...

Maxion• 8 years ago

I listened to the same episode. The interrobang seems oddly useful, strange that it hasn't caught on more.

mirimir2• 8 years ago

˙ƃuıɥʇ uʍop ǝpısdn ǝɥʇ s,ǝɹǝɥʇ uǝɥʇ pu∀

https://www.web2generators.com/text-related-tools/write-upsi...

oldandtired• 8 years ago

It needs to be upside down and back to front for all the linotype operators and lead type printers to read.

mirimir2• 8 years ago

True. But I'm not finding a site for that.

mimhoff• 8 years ago

For me the interrobang just looks too busy and small, it needs some thought put into its appearance by font designers.

Maybe back in the days of typewriters you could overlay ? and ! but I don't think it looks good today‽

SquareWheel2• 8 years ago

Agreed. I can't see myself using it because it looks so out of place and bold in a sentence.

Plus, how often do I really need to chain a question and exclamation mark together?

phicoh• 8 years ago

It seems to me that the right way to start would be to type '!?' If that gets popular, then you can have an !?-ligature.

kaushalmodi2• 8 years ago

Iosevka font has an awesome looking Interrobang. See https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/specimen.html (scroll down to the U+2030 row; ‽ is U+203d).

I think that other fonts should follow that example too.

Until then, as I anyways use subsetted fonts on my blog, I can easily specify the font to use for the ‽ glyph.

WalterBright• 8 years ago

Now we have emoji.

rubatuga• 8 years ago

What about /s for sarcasm? It seems any symbol not easily typed on the QWERTY keyboard will never be relevant.

nerdponx3• 8 years ago

The problem isn't the keyboard, it's the USB HID spec. You can easily make keyboards that can send arbitrary Unicode characters, but they still have to talk to computer in the same outdated language of scancodes.

avian2• 8 years ago

Don't be so quick to dismiss something you don't understand as outdated and in need of replacement.

If keyboards would send characters instead of scancodes you would lose the ability to switch keyboard layouts in software (or it would be an ugly hack, which it was before we started to use scancodes). Many people use their computers with multiple languages and find switching keyboard layouts on-the-fly very useful.

jlg23• 8 years ago

Without sarcasm, I wonder how long keyboards will still be relevant.

another-cuppa• 8 years ago

No example of the quasi-quote? I'm not sure how it would look, -"a bit like this"-?

annabellish• 8 years ago

They don't make it clear at that point, but the section on the interrobang makes it clear we're talking about old typewriters. "[backspace]- would result in the - being directly underneath the " on a monospace typewriter.

lmm• 8 years ago

̋-Like this̋- - backspacing on a typewriter let you do a primitive form of "composed characters"

Edit: it looked right in the submission box but not in the comment. Shrug.

Punctuation that failed to make its mark

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