cumulativehypotheses

So, reports that in France there is outrage amongst (right-wing, conservative) commentators that the current government of President Hollande (a socialist) has reconfirmed the orthographic changes proposed originally in 1990 and agreed by the government of President Chirac (right-wing, conservative) which—amongst other things—deletes the circumflex from words where it makes no difference.

Some of these reports seem to follow the wikipedia article on the circumflex in mentioning that in English, apart from loan words, the circumflex is not used today but was once: in the days when posting a letter was priced by weight an ô was used to abbreviate ough. As in “thô” for “though”. This seems like a fine convention, and one that I intend to adopt in tweets and instant messages. Now that we can pretty much assume that both ends of any messaging app conversation will have good Unicode support we can do a range of interesting things.

For example, althô you can put newlines in tweets† it seems as if many messaging apps are designed on the assumption that no–one using them ever has two consecutive thoughts and interprets a [RETURN] as send. I’ve started using ¶ in messages. I wish it could be typed on an iPhone soft keyboard. For some reason § can be, which I think is no more obscure. Anyway, the pilcrow can be copied and pasted, as can ‘∀’ to  mean “all” & ‘∃’ to mean “there’s a” or similar. I’d like to use ‘¬’ for “not” but that might be a step too far, althô I do see a lot of “!=” and “=/=” type of thing in my twitter stream. I also tend to use pairs of unspaced em–dash for parenthetical remarks—like this—which saves two characters in a tweet vs. using actual parens (like this). The ellipsis comes in very handy in several ways… ¶ Over time I’m getting more relaxed about using ‘&’ which of course has a particularly long heritage, although not so long as is sometimes thôt.¶ What other punctuation can we revive, re-purpose or re-use?

Update: how do we feel about ‘þ’ or ‘ð’, both easily available from the Icelandic keyboard, for the?

† I’ve used this to sneak footnotes into tweets. Of course, this will all become a bit pointless if the managers at Twitter really do continue to force fit their brilliant ideas into the product, rather than continuing their previously successful strategy of paving cowpaths.