Somehow it is always Russian technologists and designers who sweat this type of stuff the most and want to talk about it. When I moved from Russia to a western country in my teenage years, as a fledging web developer and previously an avid Kovodstvo [1] reader, I remember feeling upset, surprised, and deeply disappointed by the state of the real-world English language - particularly when it came to punctuation. It shocked me to see how loose and vibe-y it was, even in professional contexts. Nowadays, I understand that the majority of the world’s population has a much more casual relationship with the formal rules of their language, if those exist at all, compared to the hyper-pedantic Russians. I’m not one to say who really should be learning from whom.
I’m not a typographic nut (though I care about it more than the average American), but one of the worst trends I’ve seen is to use the square root character (√) as a checkmark (). I’ve even seen Apple do it. It doesn’t help that the checkmark glyph is generally terrible, and at least on a Mac, the shortcut (⌥+V) exists for square root, and happens to be something a Windows user might accidentally find when transitioning to Mac key bindings while the checkmark requires either knowing true code point and how to enter that in or going to the Emoji & Symbols panel.
For 99.9% of people, as long as the meaning is clear, they’ll never even register that the wrong code point, wrong symbol, or even wrong formatting was used. While I prefer correctness when possible, I’ve come to terms that others only care about communicating their intent.
There’s a quick note about the interrobang (‽) at the end. I’ve long had it in my macOS/iOS text replacement config, but nearly every font renders it so poorly that I usually manually retype the characters. It looks like a typographical mistake more often than communicating the questioned surprise that’s intended.
There was a push a few years ago by some modern fonts (as illustrated in the article) to place the overlapping exclamation and question mark at a 30-45° from each other while sharing the same dot below, which is a huge improvement, but I doubt older fonts will ever be updated.
1: https://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/
reply