slash

[Mark Mandel]

The sequence is worth following through the week. My favorite is Oct.
3<http://comics.com/peanuts/1963-10-03/>(must be Thursday), where 5
introduces himself to Snoopy:

"Hi there, puppy dog."
>
> (shaking hands) "My name is 5.... I'm new in the neighborhood...
>
> (5 walks off)
>
> (Snoopy thinks) I never get names straight. Did he say V or 5?
>

Snoopy's capital "V" has full-width lines across top and bottom,
unambiguously a Roman numeral. How do we classify that typographical
distinction? Unicode Standard v5.2, chap.
15.3<http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.2.0/ch15.pdf>(pp467-68)  has
encodings for Roman 1-12, 50, 100, 500, and 1000, but the
forms shown don't have this characteristic, which is very common in modern
handwritten Roman numerals. Presumably it comes originally from writing
explicit serifs on Roman I, which leads to joining them into solid
horizontal lines on II and III, and further to continuing the pattern on V
and X, in combination or solo.

And so we have a way of distinguishing the styles* of Malcolm X and Pius X,
but only in handwriting!

* M-W doesn't share my sense of "style": "Any distinguishing or qualifying
title, appellation, or denomination". OED (18b) says it's "rare or
obsolete". Phooey!

m a m

On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 8:53 PM, Dan Goncharoff <thegonch at gmail.com> wrote:

> Didn't Charles Schulz already walk this path when he named one of his
> characters "5"?
>
> http://comics.com/peanuts/1963-09-30/
>
> The character's full name was 5 94572, his father having changed the
> family's surname to their (recently introduced a few months before)
> ZIP code.
>
> DanG
>
> On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 3:49 PM, Garson O'Toole
> <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > On the topic of names containing characters that are not in the
> > alphabet, I recall seeing the byline "Jennifer 8. Lee" in the New York
> > Times. Here is a link to an archive of her articles and a Wikipedia
> > link.
> >
> >
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/jennifer_8_lee/index.html
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_8._Lee
> >
> > Michael Quinion spotted the name back in 2008 and wrote about it to
> > the ADS list. There is additional discussion in the ADS archive.
> >
> > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0804A&L=ADS-L&P=R13105
> >
> > Garson
> >
> > On Mon, Sep 6, 2010 at 10:29 AM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Sep 6, 2010, at 5:28 AM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 8:07 AM, Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu>
> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Not the same topic, really, but this is still about vocalized (or
> "oralized") punctuation marks:
> >>>>
> >>>> One of my students insists that she attended high school with a girl
> who spelled her name
> >>>> L--a and pronounced it "la dash ah" (the "dash" should appear as a
> solid line, probably).
> >>>>
> >>>> I shared the information about L--a with a friend who teaches in
> elementary school, and
> >>>> she reported a similarly named student in her school:  K--a.
> >>>
> >>> I posted these links to Laura Wattenberg's three-part blog post last
> >>> year, since "Ledasha" (+ variants) has come up here in the past:
> >>>
> >>>
> http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2009/10/ledasha-legends-and-race-part-one
> >>>
> http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2009/10/ledasha-legends-and-race-part-two
> >>>
> http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2009/10/ledasha-legends-and-race-part-three-of-three
> >>
> >> meanwhile, although the reports have been washing in for some time now,
> there's still no actual documentation.
> >>
> >> arnold
> >>
>

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