On 7/26/2012 3:50 AM, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> 2012-07-26 13:04, Andre Schappo kirjoitti:
>
>> Not emoticon but …….
>>
>> I received an email from Email Insider. Email was written as E✉ail
>>
>> ✉ being U+2079
>>
>> I thought it quite clever
>
> U+2079 is SUPERSCRIPT NINE “⁹”. I suppose you meant U+2709 ENVELOPE
> “✉”, an old (Unicode 1.0.0) dingbat (which now has variation sequences
> for producing text vs. emoji style).
About time that someone finds use for one of these "archaic" characters :)
>
> I don’t find a mix of letters and symbols particularly clever. Symbols
> are generally supposed to stand for concepts, ideas, or words on their
> own, not mixed with letters.
Playfulness with Dingbats is par for the course. U+2709 has a nice "M"
shape contained in it which makes a delightful visual pun.
> The symbol “✉” alone means something, though I find it disturbingly
> vague and odd: it is based on an image of a physical envelope, used
> for sending physical letters via a postal delivery system, yet it most
> often denotes something that is completely different: a modern (and
> effective) competitor of postal delivery, so-called “electronic mail”.
It's actually not an uncommon thing. It's still common to find an
outline of a steam engine as a generic symbol for things related to rail
transportation - none of the more modern shapes are equally "iconic".
Long after the technology of choice had become tape, later digital,
various symbols for answering machine were still based on record players
or loops of tape respectively. And the list goes on.
> But mixing this with words, arbitrarily replacing a letter in the word
> “email” by the symbol, might fall into the “funny” category, but not
> the “clever” category (even as a subcategory of “funny”).
Well, that's in the eye of the beholder.
A./
Received on Thu Jul 26 2012 - 10:52:41 CDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Thu Jul 26 2012 - 10:52:41 CDT