Quick question in the thread title. Recently I’ve seen it in a Pit thread title,“Mars^H^H^H^HChina Needs Women!” but there’s also other examples in the internet I’ve seen.
Is this an error in coding, and what is it meant to be?
It’s meant to indicate backspaces; on some Unix systems, hitting the backspace (or is it delete?) key will produce the ^H character.
^H means <backspace>. It is a graphical way of indicating hitting the backspace key - kind of like using the strikeout property where the text is marked with a line through it. The thread you mentioned is playing off the Mars Needs Women movie title and replacing it with China.
Even more info (if you care):
Where does it come from? The caret ‘^’ is short for “hold the control key down while hitting the next letter”. So ^H means press Control-H. Control-H maps to the ASCII character for backspace.
Oh! Thanks Sparklo and CaveMike. That’s what I love about the SDMB - fast and free answers to life’s little mysteries.
It’s sort of a joke from back in the days when everyone in a computer lab knew what it meant. A person would type an insulting message to another person, and place the “backspaces” after the insulting word. It would indicate, “I started to type [insulting word] but I changed my mind” so that you’re still blatantly insulting the other person while blatantly pretending that you’re not. Like so:
Dear Idiot^H^H^H^H^H Sir:
Thank you for contacting Technical Support.
Always use the same number of ^H’s as the number of letters in the word you “deleted”.
Tried to Google on this and provide a cite, but Google apparently won’t search on the caret symbol. Got a whole lot of 4-H Club pages, though…
Oddly, one of the Chinese symbols for “ha ha” is somewhat close to this. (I’m speaking as a man who really speaks nearly no Chinese.) A square, topped by a caret, followed by an exclamation point is “ha.” Do it twice, and you’re laughing. It should be entertaining to hear from people who really read Chinese who will tell me how far off I am. I won’t take offense; I’m an American, and I barely speak English.
They were speakin’ Arabic in their teensy voices. They mighta been West Nile mosquitoes.
You might also note that it’s just an adaptation of the far older device of using struck out, but still legible, text for the same effect. Strike out text did not exist on most early terminals, and most editors wouldn’t know how to take advantage of it if it did, so the “I erased this word” convention arose.
I’ve also seen ^W used to mean `erase previous word,’ which is simpler that matching one ^H to each letter.
I don’t know any editor where that would be a valid command*, and it certainly isn’t ASCII (ASCII control codes aren’t near that complex), but it does make sense.
*Yes, I know you can remap C-w to mean anything in Emacs. It means cut region in the default binding, and M-Del means delete previous word. But there’s no editor I’ve used with that binding as default (that I’ve been aware of).
The Jargon File speaks.
In case it’s not clear, back in the old days, when computers were hand-carved out of mastadon tusks, some unsophisticated software didn’t interpret the backspace key on PC’s correctly*. So when you hit the backspace key, instead of erasing a letter, you’d get “^H” added at the end of what you typed.
So you really would get text like “You idiot^H^H^H^H” In practice you’d notice what was on your screen, curse, rack your brain to remember the control- or alt-key for delete in that particular software and then erase all the damn control-H’s and what you meant to erase in the first place. But it worked as a joke to leave it in.
- Yes, this is very simplified, but good enough for this purpose.
Quercus: The precedent was set even before the age of PCs, when computers were no smaller than large filing cabinets and people communicated with them via the dumb terminal, a plurality of them being of the VT-100 flavor. Anyone who uses Telnet now (to play with MUDs or very old-style BBSes that just barely made the transition to the Internet) probably runs a client in VT-100 emulation mode, a nod to the days when DEC ruled large portions of the computing world.
Anyway.
PCs were invented in the 1980s as modified and extended versions of the microcomputers of the 1970s. (Basically, PCs had disk drives and OSes in software.) The ^H convention is significantly older than any machine that could be called a PC, and is a remnant of a completely different culture.