Special Characters

Factual Questions
1

Here is a question I asked Cecil and he couldn’t answer (Yes I thought that never happened.):smack:

A little help please.

I have been lurking in this mail list for some time. I have tried asking questions but was sorely disappointed. I have another question that can only be answered by y’alls geniousness

What is the name of the string of characters used in text to represent porn words. I think it has a specific number and kind of characters and a name.?

As you might imagine I don’t want to send a lame representation of the string because I might be wrong or lead you down the wrong path.

Please enlighten me and the rest of us word freaks.

2

You mean symbol swearing? Like “#@¬Ṩ)!!!”?

If you do, in comic books, those are called “grawlixes”.

3

And no, there isn’t some particular sequence of characters which has a particular meaning or is more correct than any other sequence. Some particular author or editor may prefer one sequence over another, but that’s personal preference or habit, not a global standard.

4

The term was coined by Mort Walker (creator of “Beetle Bailey” and “Hi and Lois”) in 1964. I would have thought it was older than that.

5

Grammar Girl has you covered.

I would call them variably encoded euphemisms, but obscured maledicta also works (imho).

6

Some names for individual non-alphanumeric typographical characters:

– the octothorpe

/ – the virgule
\ – the virgule sinister
& – the ampersand

  • – the asterisk
    ^ – the caret (Note: the inverted form, not a standard ASCII/ANSI character, is the hacek, written with a hacek over the C)
    â – a circumflex accent over an A
    ä – a diaeresis over an A
    à – an accent grave over an A
    á – an accent acute over an A
    ~ – a tilde
    ç – a C with cedilla
    « – left guillemet
    ¯ – a macron
    ¶ – a pilcrow

An inverted triangle, point down, is a nabla, symbolizing backward difference.

Something fascinating I ran into: In the Greek script, where pi is the symbol for the P sound, the 3.14159… number is symbolized by a lowercase omega in which the right loop is extended up and back to make an overscore above the letter.

7

To be fair … he couldn’t answer it or didn’t answer it?

8

They don’t represent porn words specifically, but just any “forbidden” word that the writer prefers not to use explicitly, or because the real words are prohibited by the publisher or whoever.

9

Right, like #@^& !&*$#.

10

Huh. In French, a virgule is the comma (with a point-virgule being the semi-colon). Which form came first, do you know?

The inverted caret is also known as the caron.

11

Sometimes $#!+ is meant to spell s-h-i-t

12

This is such a good word to know that I’ve assimilated it into my title and fused it with my other obsession du jour. Thanks.

13

Truly your prowess in naming the heretofore unnamed is unmatched in this dimension or any other. Let me know if you start taking applications for disciples.

14

I can’t make this symbol appear correctly but it has a character code of 0x76 in the standard “Symbol” font for windows. It is in fact a variant form of pi and not an omega at all though it does look like it. It’s unicode number is 03D6, and it’s LaTex name is \varpi I believe.

15

This is called the caron by the Unicode standard and approximately nobody else, which is useful to know if you need to look up a character in one of the Unicode standards documents. The origin of this term is obscure; not even the Unicode people know where it’s from.

16

If you’re goin’ overboard, go all the way. Obfuscated maledicta. Please.

Or in bad quasi-Latin for extra bonus points: s: Maladictum obfuscatum. pl: Maledicta obfuscata.

17

ALT-237 (φ) is a varpi. Not quite what you are looking for, but the closest this MB will let you render in text.

18

Nope – that looks like a psi to me. This symbol is like the standard “curvy-w” lowercase omega, but with the right semicircle extended in a smooth arc up and back above the open top of the two half-loops.

19

Yeah, I know what you mean but you can’t depict that on this message board in text.
This (ψ) is psi, and this (φ) is varpi.

20

My mistake—the character above is a varphi, not varpi.