Is anyone else seeing this? Part of my job is reviewing check payments and sometimes they go to Person A in care of Person B. Every damn person in my department and almost everyone who sends check requests to us uses the percent sign instead of c/o. What the hell is that? They don’t even look alike in the font we use (the circles are connected to the slash and even if they weren’t that top one is a circle, not a “c”). It strikes me as so unprofessional looking. If there’s an error on the check I’m supposed to note it and give it to my boss so I initially sent all of these back to her. She told me point blank that it’s not considered an error and I’m to send out the checks with it.
I’ve seen this. You’re right. It looks odd. And it couldn’t be easier to type % instead of c/o. (I just proved it by hitting the ^ the first time I tried it.)
But appalled? Just chalk it up to the general decline of Western civilization and the total abandonment of any standards whatsoever.
I don’t think this is anything new. I remember this from the days of typewriter-addressed envelopes. Perhaps these are from older people who got in the habit from having done it on the typewriter years ago? I seem to remember that in those days the font (pica or elite) looked a little better to represent c/o with %.
In the days when John Foster Dulles was Secretary of State and we were out to fight Them Commie Bastards, I can recall not merely handwriting but actual printer’s fonts that had a c/o digraph closely resembling the % symbol, even to having the C and the slash joined, and with the C clearly an open-at-the-right curve and not an O. It was, however, a completely distinct typographic entity, for which the % sign could not substitute. (OT, there was also a oo/o symbol for “parts per thousand” – i.e., 12 oo/o was equivalent to 1.2% – that seems to have gone the way of the present subjunctive.) Very rarely, one would see the % sign used on a typewritten document to substitute for c/o – indicating that the intent was to produce the c/o character which was not available on the typewriter.
It should be no significant strain to pen a c/o that is clearly a C/O and not a % in handwriting, and to identify the c/o symbol in Unicode or wherever on a computer, making the OP completely valid as regards 2004 orthography. But I felt that it was worthwhile to give a little historical background.
I have seen that. Some of my customers put % on their purchase orders. I just change it to “c/o” because I think it looks weird and I always assumed that’s what they meant (turns out I was right). I also thought maybe it was “industry-speak” as I’d never seen it before.
