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A collection of non-standard punctuation marks
- geowwy 9y agoWhat can this do that emojis can't?
- jkoll 9y ago:thinking:
- 3131s 9y agoI can't think of a corresponding emoji for many of these, like sarcasm, certitude, snark (maybe the one with its tongue sticking out?), doubt, irony, etc.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Twisol 9y agoIt's not an emoji, but as a similar sentence-ending mark, you often see /s used to indicate sarcasm. Similarly, "Kappa" may not be very popular outside a certain subculture, but it's very recognizable as snark at Twitch and adjacent communities.
- blt 9y agoWe are lacking emoji for many important emotions, but IMO we should fix that by adding emoji. I think emoji are much more aligned with natural modes of human expression than punctuation marks are.
- leichtgewicht 9y agoIs it a problem to have more than one way to express things?
- maxerickson 9y agoNothing, because they aren't different things. (the characters are more abstract than most emoji, but only most)
- colechristensen 9y agoEmoji are cute. Maybe the Japanese word for cute (可愛い) might grasp the concept a little better, but they are _something_ which should be fairly universally recognizable. They fit in a certain kind of personal communication, and maybe horrifyingly into some literature, but they don't fit in a lot of places. I'm ok using emoji with my girlfriend or if I'm trying to be sarcastic or ridiculous, but that's a rather narrow set of my communication. In short it's difficult to show decorum and use emoji. There's nothing wrong with silliness unless you can't do anything else. We are in a situation where written language use is different and more extensive than days past and it's weakness in English shows. It's difficult to express yourself properly in many situations and while emoji are one way, little cute pictures don't fit the communication gaps.
- GavinMcG 9y agoBe more precise. Emojis are ambiguous, especially cross-culturally.
- Grue3 9y agoActually blend with the text instead of sticking out like a sore thumb.
- nicklaf 9y agoTry covering up the names of these while guessing what each is supposed to symbolize. Personally, I found some of these to be rather unintuitive and sometimes arbitrary.
- broodbucket 9y agoWould exclamation or question marks be intuitive if we'd never seen them before? Not that I think we should be adding more punctuation, but I don't know that we use '?' to question because it naturally looks like it's questioning something.
- IncRnd 9y agoInteresting. I hadn't previously thought about the form of those punctuation marks. Upon looking at them, a dot intuitively ends a sentence. A dot with a line intuitively ends a sentence with emphasis, and a dot with a meandering line questions. From that perspective a question mark really does indicate uncertainty and possibly a question.
- justhackedme 9y agoThey're not real. It's a joke.
- 3131s 9y agoThe interrobang is real, but that's the only one I think.
- justhackedme 9y agoIt's not real. The symbol might be attributed some meaning, but it's not real punctuation and definitely shouldn't be.
- colechristensen 9y agoDefine "real"
- Robotbeat 9y agoWhy won't this scroll? Page doesn't work really on my iPhone 6se.
- krock 9y agoand makes my screen look really dirty.
- wybiral 9y agoYeah, I views on a laptop and thought something smudged my screen... It's this: http://progressivepunctuation.com/assets/img/concrete-wall-home.png http://progressivepunctuation.com/assets/img/concrete-wall-h...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- 482794793792894 9y agoIt does some weird parallax-effect when scrolling, which I assume uses JavaScript, so if that has some error in it somewhere, it's possible that it breaks scrolling completely.
- CalChris 9y agoIn chess, !? is interesting and ?! is dubious. So I suppose the interrobang, ‽, is WTF.
- c54 9y agoCool ideas, would love to see more... but this site itself seems unfortunately over-designed to me. It's a slideshow-style listicle (These 10 Punctuation Marks Will Blow Your Mind!), forces you to click to the next one, and makes you scroll to see an example usage for each punctuation mark.
- JoshMnem 9y agoThe idea is very interesting, but the animation is too much. I had to close it.
- Zigurd 9y agoPercontation is vastly underrated.
- paxys 9y agoI occasionally use interrobang (?! - not sure if there is a unicode character), but the rest seem quite useless. Also, this site doesn't let you copy text...WTF developers?
- yarg 9y agoI'd use a question comma, there are often times where I'll phrase a question and then expound on some deeper specifics - generally things that I would consider implied, but that many people would miss, leading to the misinterpretation of the question. Essentially everything (for me, at least) after the question comma is generally parenthetic in nature.
- yarg 9y agoAre you sure you want to do that? You're going to break your legs. Having thought a bit about it, I'd say it's the question version of a semi-colon.
- paxys 9y agoAll the examples of question comma on the site can easily be written as two sentences though.
- yarg 9y agoAnd most sentences with a semi-colon could also; it's often a matter of personal preference without well-defined fixed rules.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> And most sentences with a semi-colon could also Well, yeah, since the difference between a comma and a semi-colon is the latter joins independent clauses, it is necessarily the case that any semi-colon use for joining (as opposed to its use in, e.g., lists) can be replaced by a period, you just lose the indication that the two independent clauses are tightly associated.
- 9y ago
- asperous 9y agoI've seen these "non-standard" ones in practice: ?! - Shock and confusion "Apple did what?!" /s - Sarcasm "wow, I'm happy /s" (?) - Doubt "I think Mark said we was done (?)"
- jerrre 9y agoalso: (!) - Drawing extra attention, maybe belittling: "He wore sandals(!)"
- pasquinelli 9y agosort of related: it drives me crazy when people use a question mark to show doubt, (sometimes sarcastically), instead of to ask a question. i've never seen (?) before, but i see "i think mark said he was done?", a lot. even though it drives me crazy, it shows that special punctuation is unnecessary. people can just keep doing that awful thing, and there's no real ambiguity.
- nonsince 9y agoMany people raise the pitch of their voice as if asking a question when saying something doubtfully, so the question mark reads similarly to how one would say it out loud. If you have access to formatting, a similar way of achieving the same thing would be to italicise "think"
- dragonwriter 9y agoThe interrobang is in notable use; of the rest, the question/exclamation commas would be useful and so clear in intent that I'd adopt them immediately if they were widely supported (fonts and keyboards.)
- tempestn 9y agoLike it or not, the "friendly period" punctuation already exists :)
- Zamicol 9y agoAnd it was organically and democratically determined.
- boondaburrah 9y agoYeah that's definitely a musical symbol.
- boondaburrah 9y agoA couple of these reminded me of musical symbols I'd see on staffs and so they were already associated with something in my mind and couldn't be re-associated with whatever the authors wanted. Aw hell, I'll just mark up my text with a bunch of musical punctuation. Throw pianos and fortes all over everything.
- cassowary 9y agoHow can someone seriously propose I put a copyrighted symbol in my text to let them know it's sarcastic? [rhetorical question device] I'll bet the world will be a better place if they profit off every sarcastic sentence someone writes. [sarcastic sentence device] If you're too dumb to work out what's sarcastic, why should you benefit from my help? [friendly period] (nb. There's a missing "sarcastic sentence device", but I don't know where to put it, when it applies to a piece of punctuation.)
- metaphor 9y agoOn a congruent note, California flops on compulsory English[1], the expressive void of the interwebs yawns at over a thousand emoji code points[2], and people actually think it's a great idea to champion patented punctuation marks[3] in everyday grammar. Can this guy[4] even spell his name yet? [1] https://outline.com/Gea52v https://outline.com/Gea52v [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji [3] https://www.google.com/patents/USD608820 https://www.google.com/patents/USD608820 [4] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i-cant-write-my-name https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...
- CalChris 9y agoJust to be clear, that patent is a Design Patent, 15 years. It’s the first time I have ever seen a Design Patent mentioned in the wild. So the only remaining item on my IP punch list is a plant patent. As much as I admire Luther Burbank, asexually reproduced plants didn't need their own category.
- severine 9y agoSo there's nothing patented under 35 U.S.C. 161 (Plant Patents)? https://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/patent-basics/types-patent-applications/general-information-about-35-usc-161 https://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/patent-basics/...
- InitialLastName 9y agoI think gp is looking for the patent to be mentioned elsewhere, not simply a patent as registered. It's actually a version of bingo!
- yorwba 9y ago[4] was interesting to read, but he doesn't actually show how his name should be written and what it looks like instead. So I'm left to wonder whether it's like the example of ত (Bengali letter ta), ্ (Bengali sign virama) and (zero width joiner) combining to yield ৎ (Bengali letter khanda ta). That shouldn't be a problem for end users, if keyboards and rendering engines correctly implement the Unicode standard. That is no different than other combining marks required e.g. for accented letters in Latin alphabets. (In this case, the committee apparently determined that khanda ta was different enough to warrant it's own encoding.) I don't think Unicode needs to deal with the question of how the standardized characters will be entered. (Emoji input isn't standardized either.)
- true_religion 9y agoThis site design is beautiful---in static form. The animations are utterly unnecessary though and detract from the presentation as well as get repetitive when scrolling from item to item.
- jhanschoo 9y agoMuch punctuation evolved organically from scribal shorthand. On the internet, I can see a contraction of /s into a symbol being one of the likeliest candidates for turning into punctuation.
- justhackedme 9y agoAnd that's as formal as someone being labelled a 'troll'. None of the internet's fads or memes deserve to be preserved in punctuation rules. This is a joke.
- _nalply 9y agoIt seems people want a way to express emotion in something like a side-channel. Interpunction is fine for that, however we can't pronounce interpunction by itself and second interpunction can be placed only at specific points in the sentence (usually at the end). Emoji can be placed everywhere, however emojis can't be spoken out loud. Lojban, a constructed language, has a very interesting feature: attitudinals: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lojban/Attitudinals https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Lojban/Attitudinals An example from Wikipedia: mlatu .ui (a cat! yay!) English has also attitudinals however they belong to informal speech.
- Freak_NL 9y agoProposals for an irony punctuation sign have been around since late nineteenth century. Stylistically, I prefer this relatively recent Dutch proposal¹. But, as noted in the wikipedia articles, some feel that explicitly indicating when text is meant ironically defeats its purpose; irony is supposed to make you think. 1: The 'Het ironieteken van de CPNB' one the right: https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironieteken https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironieteken
- lordfoom 9y ago"But, as noted in the wikipedia articles, some feel that explicitly indicating when text is meant ironically defeats its purpose" Is that, in itself, irony?
- lucideer 9y agoHow many of these are part of Unicode? The download link just a font that uses the Unicode Private Use Area to display each of these glyphs, which is particularly disappointing for interrobang which I know has an entry at U+203D, but I'm not sure about the rest of them?
- xefer 9y agoSome years ago I made the case for an interrocolon, the purpose of which I do not see addressed in that list: "when the direct object of an interrogative statement references an example, a URL or another statement in a follow-on block of text". I encounter uses for this all the time especially when texting. https://xefer.com/2008/03/interrocolon https://xefer.com/2008/03/interrocolon
- Doctor_Fegg 9y agoPlease don't show this page to Larry Wall.
- ksh888 9y agoGoddamn I really thought it's screen clean time again... They call that "concrete wall"? http://progressivepunctuation.com/assets/img/concrete-wall-home.png http://progressivepunctuation.com/assets/img/concrete-wall-h...
- BuuQu9hu 9y agoDon't diss the tried and true "multi-bang", seen in saccharine congratulatory messages the world around (e.g. "!!", "!!!", etc., on up to the elusive "octo-bang" of "!!!!!!!!").
- DonHopkins 9y agoThe Artist Formerly And Then Again Known As Prince had his own single-character font just for rendering His Symbol, and his PR company send around copies of a floppy disk with Windows and Mac versions of the font, along with these instructions for writing about him: https://www.milk.com/wall-o-shame/bruce_font.html https://www.milk.com/wall-o-shame/bruce_font.html http://anildash.com/2014/06/my-favorite-floppy-of-all-time.html http://anildash.com/2014/06/my-favorite-floppy-of-all-time.h... https://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-in-unicode/ https://parkerhiggins.net/2013/01/writing-the-prince-symbol-...
- DonHopkins 9y agoYears ago I wrote a perfectly reasonable comment like /* WTF??!?!!?!???? */ and the old C compiler complained about "invalid trigraph". A syntax error in the middle of a comment! Took me a while to figure out that "trigraph" was referring to some part of "??!?!!?!????" and not "WTF".