9 ms·

Punctuation that failed to make its mark

52 points by ZeljkoS 8y ago

akavel 8y ago
This made me think that smileys & emoticons are actually the new generation of punctuation marks :P
- k__ 8y ago
  As much as there are right now, they may as well be the western Kanji
- raxxorrax 8y 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 8y 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.
- jfk13 8y 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 8y 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.
- ghaff 8y 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 8y 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.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
mimhoff 8y 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‽
- SquareWheel 8y 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 8y 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.
    - SquareWheel 8y ago
      Agreed. Ligatures seem like a much more elegant solution.
- kaushalmodi 8y ago
  Iosevka font has an awesome looking Interrobang. See https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/specimen.html 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.
lainga 8y 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 8y ago
  i use it to denote a lasting sound. like heeey = hey~
  - Jedd 8y 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 8y 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‽
  - ghaff 8y 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 8y 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.
themodelplumber 8y 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 8y ago
Interrobang survived, not as its own symbol, but in ?! form.
- hinkley 8y ago
  Are you sure‽
- jejones3141 8y ago
  U+203D is interrobang.
- Jaxan 8y ago
  But in what order should they come!?
  - jfk13 8y ago
    Isn't it obvious?!
kaushalmodi 8y 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/a70dd6b7c39f0ab6513d286b001245345be2636e https://github.com/kaushalmodi/.emacs.d/commit/a70dd6b7c39f0...
- Maxion 8y ago
  I listened to the same episode. The interrobang seems oddly useful, strange that it hasn't caught on more.
mirimir 8y ago
˙ƃuıɥʇ uʍop ǝpısdn ǝɥʇ s,ǝɹǝɥʇ uǝɥʇ pu∀ https://www.web2generators.com/text-related-tools/write-upside-down https://www.web2generators.com/text-related-tools/write-upsi...
- oldandtired 8y ago
  It needs to be upside down and back to front for all the linotype operators and lead type printers to read.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    True. But I'm not finding a site for that.
WalterBright 8y ago
Now we have emoji.
rubatuga 8y ago
What about /s for sarcasm? It seems any symbol not easily typed on the QWERTY keyboard will never be relevant.
- nerdponx 8y 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.
  - avian 8y 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.
    - spongeb00b 8y ago
      The Apple Lisa was kind of half way in this direction. The Lisa ROM contained the matrix layout for each keyboard language, but it was the keyboard itself that would return both the scancode and the fixed language of the keyboard being used. And IIRC plugging in a keyboard of a different language would automatically change the system software the use that language.
    - nerdponx 8y ago
      You're absolutely right. I personally think we should have both systems: The current "position dependent" system we have now, and a system for sending Unicode.
    - rwmj 8y ago
      While there might be a handful of people who switch keyboard layouts, I imagine that different keyboard layouts causes far more problems, lost time, and engineering effort. Overall it would still be better if keyboards sent Unicode characters.
another-cuppa 8y ago
No example of the quasi-quote? I'm not sure how it would look, -"a bit like this"-?
- annabellish 8y 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 8y 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.

52 points by ZeljkoS 8y ago

akavel 8y ago

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

k__ 8y ago
As much as there are right now, they may as well be the western Kanji
raxxorrax 8y 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 8y 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.

jfk13 8y 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 8y 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.
ghaff 8y 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 8y 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.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

mimhoff 8y 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‽

SquareWheel 8y 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 8y 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.
  - SquareWheel 8y ago
    Agreed. Ligatures seem like a much more elegant solution.
kaushalmodi 8y ago
Iosevka font has an awesome looking Interrobang. See https://be5invis.github.io/Iosevka/specimen.html 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.

lainga 8y 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 8y ago
i use it to denote a lasting sound. like heeey = hey~
- Jedd 8y 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 8y 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‽
- ghaff 8y 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 8y 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.

themodelplumber 8y 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 8y ago

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

hinkley 8y ago
Are you sure‽
jejones3141 8y ago
U+203D is interrobang.
Jaxan 8y ago
But in what order should they come!?
- jfk13 8y ago
  Isn't it obvious?!

kaushalmodi 8y 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/a70dd6b7c39f0ab6513d286b001245345be2636e https://github.com/kaushalmodi/.emacs.d/commit/a70dd6b7c39f0...

Maxion 8y ago
I listened to the same episode. The interrobang seems oddly useful, strange that it hasn't caught on more.

mirimir 8y ago

˙ƃuıɥʇ uʍop ǝpısdn ǝɥʇ s,ǝɹǝɥʇ uǝɥʇ pu∀ https://www.web2generators.com/text-related-tools/write-upside-down https://www.web2generators.com/text-related-tools/write-upsi...

oldandtired 8y ago
It needs to be upside down and back to front for all the linotype operators and lead type printers to read.
- mirimir 8y ago
  True. But I'm not finding a site for that.

WalterBright 8y ago

Now we have emoji.

rubatuga 8y ago

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

nerdponx 8y 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.
- avian 8y 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.
  - spongeb00b 8y ago
    The Apple Lisa was kind of half way in this direction. The Lisa ROM contained the matrix layout for each keyboard language, but it was the keyboard itself that would return both the scancode and the fixed language of the keyboard being used. And IIRC plugging in a keyboard of a different language would automatically change the system software the use that language.
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    You're absolutely right. I personally think we should have both systems: The current "position dependent" system we have now, and a system for sending Unicode.
  - rwmj 8y ago
    While there might be a handful of people who switch keyboard layouts, I imagine that different keyboard layouts causes far more problems, lost time, and engineering effort. Overall it would still be better if keyboards sent Unicode characters.

another-cuppa 8y ago

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

annabellish 8y 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 8y 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.