Somehow it is always Russian technologists and designers who sweat this type of stuff the most and want to talk about it. When I moved from Russia to a western country in my teenage years, as a fledging web developer and previously an avid Kovodstvo [1] reader, I remember feeling upset, surprised, and deeply disappointed by the state of the real-world English language - particularly when it came to punctuation. It shocked me to see how loose and vibe-y it was, even in professional contexts. Nowadays, I understand that the majority of the world’s population has a much more casual relationship with the formal rules of their language, if those exist at all, compared to the hyper-pedantic Russians. I’m not one to say who really should be learning from whom.
I’m not a typographic nut (though I care about it more than the average American), but one of the worst trends I’ve seen is to use the square root character (√) as a checkmark (). I’ve even seen Apple do it. It doesn’t help that the checkmark glyph is generally terrible, and at least on a Mac, the shortcut (⌥+V) exists for square root, and happens to be something a Windows user might accidentally find when transitioning to Mac key bindings while the checkmark requires either knowing true code point and how to enter that in or going to the Emoji & Symbols panel.
For 99.9% of people, as long as the meaning is clear, they’ll never even register that the wrong code point, wrong symbol, or even wrong formatting was used. While I prefer correctness when possible, I’ve come to terms that others only care about communicating their intent.
> to use the square root character (√) as a checkmark ([filtered out])
IMHO that's an old-school-ism: I've never seen that in the post-Unicode world, but I recall its being common in the days of PC-compatibles, when square root was one of the ~256 characters you got, and checkmark wasn't, so you made do. In the same bucket with "using eszett (ß) as a lowercase beta (β)" or "using upper-half-of-integral (⌠) as a long S (ſ)." In fact Wikipedia's footnotes mention all three of these substitutions. (Or "using hyphen-minus (-) as a minus sign (−)." ;))
I’ll own up to being someone who does this when I’m on a Mac. The reason is simple: they don’t give you a way to type a “real” check. And though Emoji contain suitable ones, those aren’t always appropriate (or allowed, such as here).
On a Mac, the facility you’re given to pick emoji (which is also the same palette you’d need to pick a fancy checkmark Unicode) is horrifyingly bad - it’s slow and hard to use, and has been getting worse.
Of course, iOS, whose emoji picker is pretty nice by comparison, completely lacks a first-party character palette and doesn’t support the “option key” method, so on iOS, it’s emoji or nothing.
> On a Mac, the facility you’re given to pick emoji (which is also the same palette you’d need to pick a fancy checkmark Unicode) is horrifyingly bad - it’s slow and hard to use, and has been getting worse.
Ugh, I hate this too.
- Slow animation to open -- search field is not focused until the animation finishes.
- Keyboard navigation is horrible. I never know if it can be trusted, because sometimes it can't? I'll press Enter to select the symbol I want, and it'll defocus the text field. If I don't catch it and click back in the text field fast enough, I'll have to re-open the menu and try again, but by clicking this time. So why try the keyboard in the first place?
- Slow animation to close -- when I open the menu accidentally (I have it set to Fn press) it feels like nearly a second of wait before my application is interactive again.
That's pretty funny, I had in some sense the opposite experience. Learning Russian, at the point where I got beyond the beginner stage, I was really put off by the intense prescriptivism. As you learn languages you also learn that they all have their own pet-peeves (usually functioning like class markers). But in Russian it's taken to a point where linguistic diversity is looked down (perhaps apart from specialized slang) even in informal conversations. This is probably also related to the fact that the language famously has very little dialectical variation, which is especially surprising given the size of the country where it originates from.
I personally think that it's just fun and “in the spirit” of writing to be pedantic about it and typographically expressive in general. In many ways, writing is a very creative process, because it involves “fixating thoughts”, making something very analogue into something almost (but not completely) discrete; it's akin to graphic design in general in my eyes. And when I can bring some extra flavour to it – by sticking to pedantic rules, using rare typographic marks that have a meaning that's more historical now, or anything else – I tend to do it, even if just for my own amusement.
I do not mean this to be lessen the craft of typography (which I am certain that it is!): For me, typography/styling beyond the very basics of bold, underline, italics and so on feels a bit like an aquired taste. Whenever I engage with related contend, I hear claims being made like "A helps to convey X", or "B and C should not mix, else Y!" - and I don't doubt that these claims are true, but I wonder if they are true for a selected few who pay attention to such things, or to statistically average person. My gut feeling would be that there are handful of claims that provably help get a message/intention across to a big group of people due to a mix of convention and how our brain processes what it sees - and at least 3/4 of claims that would not show such effect.
One proxy to try to answer this question would be to look at what successfull advertisements use (not necessarily the ones that win prices, but the ones that drive up sales). Their advertisment media might have other qualities that might offset typography/styling sins, but they are more likely to be intentional about using typography/styling to get their point across.
There’s a quick note about the interrobang (‽) at the end. I’ve long had it in my macOS/iOS text replacement config, but nearly every font renders it so poorly that I usually manually retype the characters. It looks like a typographical mistake more often than communicating the questioned surprise that’s intended.
There was a push a few years ago by some modern fonts (as illustrated in the article) to place the overlapping exclamation and question mark at a 30-45° from each other while sharing the same dot below, which is a huge improvement, but I doubt older fonts will ever be updated.
Reference to the emdash qua LLM-ism is now more of a cliche than the actual LLM use thereof. What grates about AI slop is the actual prose, and the writing here is just fine, frankly. Most importantly, it's not trying to pad out insignificant points, sound like marketing copy, etc.
Somehow it is always Russian technologists and designers who sweat this type of stuff the most and want to talk about it. When I moved from Russia to a western country in my teenage years, as a fledging web developer and previously an avid Kovodstvo [1] reader, I remember feeling upset, surprised, and deeply disappointed by the state of the real-world English language - particularly when it came to punctuation. It shocked me to see how loose and vibe-y it was, even in professional contexts. Nowadays, I understand that the majority of the world’s population has a much more casual relationship with the formal rules of their language, if those exist at all, compared to the hyper-pedantic Russians. I’m not one to say who really should be learning from whom.
1: https://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/
I’m not a typographic nut (though I care about it more than the average American), but one of the worst trends I’ve seen is to use the square root character (√) as a checkmark (). I’ve even seen Apple do it. It doesn’t help that the checkmark glyph is generally terrible, and at least on a Mac, the shortcut (⌥+V) exists for square root, and happens to be something a Windows user might accidentally find when transitioning to Mac key bindings while the checkmark requires either knowing true code point and how to enter that in or going to the Emoji & Symbols panel.
For 99.9% of people, as long as the meaning is clear, they’ll never even register that the wrong code point, wrong symbol, or even wrong formatting was used. While I prefer correctness when possible, I’ve come to terms that others only care about communicating their intent.
> to use the square root character (√) as a checkmark ([filtered out])
IMHO that's an old-school-ism: I've never seen that in the post-Unicode world, but I recall its being common in the days of PC-compatibles, when square root was one of the ~256 characters you got, and checkmark wasn't, so you made do. In the same bucket with "using eszett (ß) as a lowercase beta (β)" or "using upper-half-of-integral (⌠) as a long S (ſ)." In fact Wikipedia's footnotes mention all three of these substitutions. (Or "using hyphen-minus (-) as a minus sign (−)." ;))
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437
[2] - https://knowware.dk/dos56/norton-commander-1.shtml — see the last two screenshots on this page, from Norton Commander
I’ll own up to being someone who does this when I’m on a Mac. The reason is simple: they don’t give you a way to type a “real” check. And though Emoji contain suitable ones, those aren’t always appropriate (or allowed, such as here).
On a Mac, the facility you’re given to pick emoji (which is also the same palette you’d need to pick a fancy checkmark Unicode) is horrifyingly bad - it’s slow and hard to use, and has been getting worse.
Of course, iOS, whose emoji picker is pretty nice by comparison, completely lacks a first-party character palette and doesn’t support the “option key” method, so on iOS, it’s emoji or nothing.
> On a Mac, the facility you’re given to pick emoji (which is also the same palette you’d need to pick a fancy checkmark Unicode) is horrifyingly bad - it’s slow and hard to use, and has been getting worse.
Ugh, I hate this too.
- Slow animation to open -- search field is not focused until the animation finishes.
- Keyboard navigation is horrible. I never know if it can be trusted, because sometimes it can't? I'll press Enter to select the symbol I want, and it'll defocus the text field. If I don't catch it and click back in the text field fast enough, I'll have to re-open the menu and try again, but by clicking this time. So why try the keyboard in the first place?
- Slow animation to close -- when I open the menu accidentally (I have it set to Fn press) it feels like nearly a second of wait before my application is interactive again.
That's pretty funny, I had in some sense the opposite experience. Learning Russian, at the point where I got beyond the beginner stage, I was really put off by the intense prescriptivism. As you learn languages you also learn that they all have their own pet-peeves (usually functioning like class markers). But in Russian it's taken to a point where linguistic diversity is looked down (perhaps apart from specialized slang) even in informal conversations. This is probably also related to the fact that the language famously has very little dialectical variation, which is especially surprising given the size of the country where it originates from.
> I’m not one to say who really should be learning from whom.
We can learn from both!
We can appreciate the intuitiveness of languages with looser grammar, and the rational elegance of stricter languages. And then there’s French :)
I personally think that it's just fun and “in the spirit” of writing to be pedantic about it and typographically expressive in general. In many ways, writing is a very creative process, because it involves “fixating thoughts”, making something very analogue into something almost (but not completely) discrete; it's akin to graphic design in general in my eyes. And when I can bring some extra flavour to it – by sticking to pedantic rules, using rare typographic marks that have a meaning that's more historical now, or anything else – I tend to do it, even if just for my own amusement.
I do not mean this to be lessen the craft of typography (which I am certain that it is!): For me, typography/styling beyond the very basics of bold, underline, italics and so on feels a bit like an aquired taste. Whenever I engage with related contend, I hear claims being made like "A helps to convey X", or "B and C should not mix, else Y!" - and I don't doubt that these claims are true, but I wonder if they are true for a selected few who pay attention to such things, or to statistically average person. My gut feeling would be that there are handful of claims that provably help get a message/intention across to a big group of people due to a mix of convention and how our brain processes what it sees - and at least 3/4 of claims that would not show such effect.
One proxy to try to answer this question would be to look at what successfull advertisements use (not necessarily the ones that win prices, but the ones that drive up sales). Their advertisment media might have other qualities that might offset typography/styling sins, but they are more likely to be intentional about using typography/styling to get their point across.
Садись. Двойка! - "Sit down, you got an F" :) - sorry, as bulgarian it was funny to me this used as example (from russian).
"Садись, два» is more idiomatic
There’s a quick note about the interrobang (‽) at the end. I’ve long had it in my macOS/iOS text replacement config, but nearly every font renders it so poorly that I usually manually retype the characters. It looks like a typographical mistake more often than communicating the questioned surprise that’s intended.
There was a push a few years ago by some modern fonts (as illustrated in the article) to place the overlapping exclamation and question mark at a 30-45° from each other while sharing the same dot below, which is a huge improvement, but I doubt older fonts will ever be updated.
Linux:
Compose key, period, period = ellipsis …
Compose key, period, equals = bullet •
Compose key, period, minus = interpunct ·
Compose key, !, ? = interrobang ‽
I'm turning on cancel culture, no russian reading
Original title:
Manual: •.,:;…!?·
(Except printed in a really cool font!)
Nice reference – thanks for the post!
>In European and many other languages[...]
What? I was taught danish, english, german, french - never European.
In European languages, and in many other languages that are not European.
Interesting how the article does not “delve” into the use of the emdash, considering its own excessive use of it.
There is a separate manual for dashes: https://type.today/en/journal/dash
Reference to the emdash qua LLM-ism is now more of a cliche than the actual LLM use thereof. What grates about AI slop is the actual prose, and the writing here is just fine, frankly. Most importantly, it's not trying to pad out insignificant points, sound like marketing copy, etc.