I doubt very much it has anything to do with politics. A 'K' in the box
score means 'strikeout'; a reversed 'K' means, uh, I forget what exactly,
but I'm sure you could find it on the net somewhere. The guy across the
hall things it means the catcher dropped the third strike, which technically
speaking means its not a strikeout, since the batter must be tagged out.
But I think that's a little too arcane; I think it might mean the batter
went down swinging. In any case, I'm pretty sure reversing the K just adds
one of some statistical bit of info to the basic idea of "strikeout". Also,
I wouldn't ordinarily thing of the box score as a string. You can stuff
much more info into one of those little boxes than seems decent. Its
actually a very sophisticated and compact shorthand that records, in about
the space of a single CJK character, what happened, in what order, involving
which players, etc.
Hmmm. I don't see the "Box Score" block in Unicode. Is Unicode oppressing
sports fans?
-gregg
> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Cowan [mailto:cowan@locke.ccil.org]
> Sent: Monday, October 04, 1999 9:15 AM
> To: Unicode List
> Subject: LATIN CAPITAL LETTER REVERSED K?
>
>
> I have just learned that in recording the box scores in baseball
> (an international game despite its U.S. origins), the letter K is
> rendered in reverse when appearing in strings of length > 3,
> so as to avoid the (U.S.) political implications of "KKK".
>
> Does this usage count as plain text, or is it more like a font
> difference or dingbat?
>
> --
> John Cowan cowan@ccil.org
> I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin
>
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