New symbols don't last?
Dumb convective thought.

The standard computer keyboard, and the conventions of digital writing, have brought several punctuation marks into common use.

@ and # are most obvious. Oddly, both were essentially obsolete, a vestige of quaint business usage along with pr, ea, bbl, the long-d ditto**, or "Yrs of the 14th ult to hand". @ was starting to disappear from typewriters in the '70s, and nobody missed it.

Others were math symbols that moved into language. Less-than and Greater-than weren't on any keyboards at all, not even on early keypunches. Now we commonly use both in their math sense or by slight extension to mean Worse or Better. But why didn't the proper symbols for <= and >= and != get on the keyboard or into ASCII?

Square brackets have always been at home in writing and remain so. Curly brackets had been a fairly obscure convention of formula-writing and set theory until C adopted them as markers. They're on the keyboard but still haven't found a literary purpose.

Only two symbols are truly new in the PC era, and both are already fading. \ and |, backslash and pipe. Both were used heavily in DOS command lines and batching, which have now disappeared. Neither has become popular in writing, neither has found a home in metaphor. I sometimes use \ to indicate a downward intonation, but that's highly specialized. In programming | is bitwise OR, a rarely needed action. Logical OR, ||, has become especially common and powerful in Javascript. It's beginning to invade normal language.

I suspect we will soon drop \ from keyboards and replace | by a single-keystroke ||.

It would be NICE to bring + and * down into a non-shifted position while we're rearranging things, but that's obviously too much to ask. Speed and accuracy are unacceptable goals.

= = = = =

**Footnote: I was surprised that no examples of the long-d ditto appear online. It was a very common trick for several centuries, not only in ledgers but in all sorts of tabulated lists. Maybe there's a proper name that would yield better search results, but I doubt it. As a 'public service' to remedy this lack, I've crudely assembled an example from a printed ledger in an old bookkeeping magazine.

Here's the printed version. Note the repetitive "do for ditto in the description column.


A more common practice in a handwritten ledger was to pull the ascender part of the d down across the rows. This was still common in the '70s. Not a good representation because it's part hand and part printed, but maybe it gets the idea across.


The same magazine included two irresistibly awful ads.

First this one, which might be less than ideally effective today, unless 'effective' is defined as 'instant jail and worldwide riots'.


And finally this one.


While you're helplessly sliding backward to a point where your output will inevitably miss the mark, to put it mildly ... you can dream about moons with hands emerging from the water to mock you.

CHRIST ALMIGHTY! WHAT IN THE HOLY FUCK WERE THEY THINKING? OR SMOKING? OR SNORTING? (Dead serious: Both of these ads look like LSD. Wonder if there was ergot in the bread back then.)

Labels: Language update

  ¶ 5:10 AM