I’ve found I use the tilde ~ almost daily in work communications (i.e. ~ 10:30am, ~ 4-5 weeks, ~ $17k). And now I’ve started using it a lot in personal texts and emails.
Just yesterday I gave our dog sitter written instructions to give Maxo his medication 1 dose ~ 7am and one dose ~ 7pm.
I don’t want to be a snob and confirm with people “do you know what ~ means” but I also don’t want to be presumptuous.
Do you think it’s widely used enough that most people understand it?
If you mean its informal common usage as “approximate” then yes, I think most people get it. The proper symbol is the double tilde ≈.
If you mean its formal usage in mathematics and programming, probably less so.
I have used it occasionally most often in casual conversations as an accent. I have used it more formally in the past when my work dealt with numerical issues.
I often use it like the OP, even if
DC≈DC, sorry, I mean DCnDC is right, but the proper symbol is harder to make and I am lazy.
But I also put it on top of n to make a different letter we use in Spanish: ñ. Capitalized as Ñ.
I’ve never heard of or seen the double tilde. Thanks for info, but I’m unlikely to hunt up how to produce one and start using it; I’ll keep on using what’s apparently only the approximately right symbol for “approximately”.
I do frequently use a tilde that way, though usually in notes to myself.
I think this is a little biased - it may be that most people in your circle would get it , but I certainly wouldn’t expect a dog-sitter or a home attendant to understand it. They might, but I wouldn’t expect it.
Behold, the triple tilde ≋!
Native English speakers? Probably. But I wouldn’t use it for work-related communications. I would write out approximately or circa, so I don’t have to worry if Google translate understands the tilde.
That’s the ASCII symbol for rockabilly hairdresser, hadn’t seen it for a long time! Or was it Zapf Dingsbat?
To the OP-- I wouldn’t assume the use of the tilde as ‘approximate’ to be very widely known, and I wouldn’t use it in your case. But not only for the reason that it’s possibly not widely known. If your dog sitter doesn’t know the meaning, they’ll just be confused. But if they do know the meaning, why give them leeway? Just say a dose at 7am and another at 7pm.
Your dog sitter may be very punctilious, but in my experience if you tell someone to do something or show up ‘around’ a certain time, they may take that very loosely, like “within an hour or so”. Tell them an exact time, and they may still be late, but only by more like 5 or 10 minutes. At least, that was my experience with our kids growing up-- I’d tell them "be ready to leave absolutely no later than (time 10-15 minutes before the actual time we need to leave) and we’d still barely make the actual time.
Waltzing My Tilde
My understanding is that the actual meaning of the tilde varies by context?
This context is clear to anyone who has never even seen one before.
I very much doubt that. It’s clear to me; but only because I learned it years ago.
I agree both that it’s a common use, and that I wouldn’t use it in a note to a catsitter without clarification, because “common” isn’t the same as “ubiquitous”.
I think that general literacy is so low that this is profoundly unlikely.
It is literally a wave at the number. Can’t get more self explanatory by context than that.
(And FWIW used as an “approximately” as in rounding by most in middle school years. Not very high level stuff.)
I don’t see the tilde meaning around or approximately used outside of moderately high level works. Even newspapers that follow the AP stylebook won’t use it.
I wouldn’t expect anybody young who isn’t a bookworm to understand it without an explanation.
As @solost suggested, either just use the times or make sure anything you write down is talked about beforehand.
Looks like that to you. Even if we assume, implausibly, that it looks like that to everybody: if you wave at something, what I see is that you’re trying to draw attention to it; which could be taken at least as easily (if not more so) as meaning “this exact number is important” instead of meaning “this exact number isn’t important”.
~ is a shortcut to your home path in Unix & Linux operating systems. I thought everyone knew that.
Really people, get with it, this is the tilde’s primary use. It’s not approximately your home directory, it is exactly your home directory. Sure, you can type out $HOME, but more characters, and it doesn’t help at all if you’re referring to some other users home directory, ~muldoonthief. I mean, doing something like $(getent passwd muldoonthief | cut -d: -f6) is just stupid when a ~ is all that’s needed.
It even works in urls. Back in the 90s most personal homepages were something like http://www.example.com/~echoreply
I have long known what a tilde is, but never once thought of it that way.