28 February 2007

Brought to you by the letter thorn

With the rise of text messaging and new uses for old words, it’s time to reinstate a letter that fell out of (noticeable) use a while back: the Old and Middle English thorn. This is something that a few emoticon users have already picked up on when they want their text-faces to stick out their tongues. The usual practice is to use a capital P or a lowercase b, resulting in :-P or :-b, for example. Using a thorn allows your emoticon to stick its tongue out the middle of its mouth.

Since most decent web browsers readily render unicode characters, this should be an easy addition to one’s online repertoire: just type :-Þ to get :-Þ.

The return of thorn will have an additional benefit: merchants who insist on calling their stores something like “Ye Olde Shoppe” can get it right by turning the Y into a Þ.

Pedantic update (Mar. 26): Here’s a visual representation of the evolution of “þe” to “ye”:

thorny evolution

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