[HN Gopher] An Emoji from 1803
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An Emoji from 1803
Author : donohoe
Score : 108 points
Date : 2021-09-04 16:39 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| bckr wrote:
| I expected to have cause to say "that's not an emoji, that's an
| emoticon", but I did not have such cause.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Traditionally, we'd just have called that a dingbat. (See U+261E,
| in the long-established Dingbats block of Unicode.)
| leephillips wrote:
| "Braggadocio" is due for a revival.
| donohoe wrote:
| Before this, the earliest example that people had found was 1862
|
| https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/hfo-emoticon/
| gibspaulding wrote:
| The glyph is much older than that, though perhaps the usage was
| slightly different. Wikipedia says they were being hand drawn
| as early as the 1100's and were being used on printing presses
| by 1484.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_(typography)
| rsynnott wrote:
| I think the interesting thing here is not so much that the
| glyph exists (lots of typographical symbols have existed for
| a long time) but that it is being used much as we use emojis
| today.
| yreg wrote:
| The server redirects me to err 503 after a short moment.
|
| Here's an archive link:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210818212153/https://cityroom....
| donohoe wrote:
| Hmm. Still works for me but thank you for providing the
| archive URL.
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Equally interesting is "it's twitter from 1803" - "TO THE PUBLIC"
| it was called back then.
| marstall wrote:
| ha true. also a touch of those trashy "you won't believe what
| happened next" ads
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Imagine, you could actually see adverts for real "snake oil"!
| mproud wrote:
| Wow, he gave him the finger!
| willsoon wrote:
| I read in some Nabokov's interview back in my time. At some point
| the questions goes like how do you would rank yourself among
| other contemporaries writers or something along that. He responds
| that it should be a typography sign, like a lying closing
| parenthesis, and then he would trace it as the proper answer. For
| me, it was the first time I hear about a emoji.
| whoomp12342 wrote:
| its a tricky one. FInger of contempt = awful, bad Two fingers of
| contempt pointing in the same direction = aaayyyyy
| signa11 wrote:
| wouldn't egyptian hieroglyphs count as them from waay back ?
| OJFord wrote:
| No, because they weren't (as far as I know?) used within a body
| of text written using a different alphabet system?
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I may be mistaken but I seem to recall that when [Egyptian]
| pictograms were later adapted to be syllabic representations
| (letters) there was a crossover period where the pictogram
| was used both as a 'word' (representing the whole thing the
| pictogram showed, a horned viper say) and also used in the
| same text to represent a sound/syllable (f; which is a 90
| degree rotated viper!).
|
| I cannot recall where I got this from however, possibly from
| a YouTube lecture by Irvin Finkel (I think it was he) or from
| the recent Netflix on the Saqqara tomb (less likely)??
|
| https://collector.com/12-animal-hieroglyphs-and-how-the-
| anci... lends credence to this without getting us all the way
| there.
| susam wrote:
| > TO THE PUBLIC. HAVING received an Insult from _Otho H. W.
| Luckett_ , for which he refused to make the Reparation demanded--
| I do declare him a _Coward_ , a _Braggadochio_ , and a Fellow, at
| whom the <white right pointing index finger symbol here> Finger
| of Contempt should always be pointed. WILLIAM CHAPMAN. Frederick-
| Town, Sept. 23, 1803* 3w
|
| The usage of the _long s_ (s), the archaic form of the letter
| "s", is also quite interesting. Note how "Insult", "refused", and
| "should" are written with the long s but "always" is written with
| the short s because it occurs at the end of the word.
|
| The long s is one of my favourite extinct characters because it
| is the ancestor of the current day integral symbol ([?])
| introduced by Leibniz.
| [deleted]
| mrunseen wrote:
| It is also found at German eszett ss, which essentially is a
| ligature of "ss".
|
| Also that index finger is actually a unicode character (
| U+261A)
| ModernMech wrote:
| Huh, the use of the word "fellow" here I've never seen before. It
| probably means this: a. obsolete : a person of
| one of the lower social classes b. archaic : a worthless
| man or boy
| indymike wrote:
| "Fellow" also means "a member of a group of high-ranking
| teachers at a particular college or university or of a
| particular educational society". I believe he was saying
| roughly that Mr. Luckett was a member of the college deserving
| of the finger of contempt. This was an extremely well played
| insult.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| I mentally deleted the following comma to obtain "a fellow at
| whom the finger ..", in which case it's just the common sense
| of 'person', with some extra connotations of condescension.
| colanderman wrote:
| > 6. (obsolete) A man without good breeding or worth; an
| ignoble or mean man.
|
| from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fellow
| jcadam wrote:
| My ancestor's discharge papers from the US Army during the civil
| war make use of the "pointed finger" where nowadays one would
| naturally use bullet points.
| eigenschwarz wrote:
| Love Isaac Newton's use of the manicule:
| https://log.nikhil.io/posts/78a93e2073695830831f94eb80032ace...
| marstall wrote:
| soooo curious how Otho H.W. Lockett responded ... seems like a
| potential pistols at dawn type of scenario
| jimmaswell wrote:
| https://yeoldenews.tumblr.com/post/617391302806568960/yeolde...
| marstall wrote:
| damn! ask and ye shall receive. so cool. thanks :)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The "pointing finger" symbol is quite old. I'll bet that it would
| be easy to find its use, well before this.
|
| Although its use, in this ad, is pretty much exactly how we use
| emojis, these days.
| OJFord wrote:
| I don't think anybody's suggesting the printer gained the
| capability to print the finger just for this - it's the latter,
| the way its used, that's somewhat interesting here.
| gpvos wrote:
| U+261E FINGER OF CONTEMPT
| gpvos wrote:
| In fact, in the Unicode charts, U+261E WHITE RIGHT POINTING
| INDEX has as an _informative alias:_ "= fist (typographic
| term)". So there is some evidence of belligerence there
| already. Also see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fist_(typography) .
| foresto wrote:
| The Dreadful Flying Glove (Yellow Submarine, 1968) suddenly
| feels all the more menacing.
|
| https://yellowsubmarine.fandom.com/wiki/The_Dreadful_Flying_.
| ..
| busyant wrote:
| Manicule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_(typography)
| jshprentz wrote:
| Paul McPharlin provides an extensive history of manicules
| starting on page 47 of his 1942 book, Roman Numerals,
| Typographic Leaves and Pointing Hands [1].
|
| "Why did so many readers, until relatively recently, take the
| trouble to stop and draw a whole hand when they simply wanted
| to mark something as important? And why did so many authors and
| printers use the increasingly heavy-handed image of the
| manicule to direct the attention of their readers?" William H.
| Sherman explains in his 2005 paper, Toward a History of the
| Manicule [2].
|
| [1] http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b4200870
|
| [2] http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/papers/FOR_2005_04_001.pdf
| gxqoz wrote:
| This is also considered in Keith Houston's entertaining book
| Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols,
| and Other Typographical Marks.
|
| It traces the history of some other common symbols such as
| the at sign and asterisk.
| rvz wrote:
| Precisely. It is not an emoji and is under the miscellaneous
| unicode symbols in most OSes and the like. Not exactly
| 'Emojis'.
|
| But of course on Twitter, misinformation is ok.
|
| Downvoters: So you're telling me it is an emoji then?
|
| Is '' an emoji then? Can you see it?
| breakfastduck wrote:
| You're getting downvoted not because you're _wrong_ about
| _what that symbol is_ , but because you're immediately
| leaping from 'someone makes a light hearted comparison on
| twitter' to 'someone is spreading misinformation'.
|
| Honestly, there's really no need to take a throwaway tweet so
| seriously.
| wildywayz wrote:
| Doesn't matter what it was.
|
| https://emojipedia.org/black-left-pointing-index/
| rvz wrote:
| You mean this? (U+261A) and not (U+1F448) [0] [1]?
|
| From: [0]
|
| > This Unicode character has no emoji version, meaning this
| is intended to display only as a black and white glyph on
| most platforms.
|
| I guess that means '' and 'U+261A' are emojis then?
|
| [0] https://emojipedia.org/black-left-pointing-index/
|
| [1] https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+261A
| yreg wrote:
| is not specified by Unicode. Why are you so angry?
| rvz wrote:
| A very simple question: Is '' aka (U+F8FF) and 'U+261A'
| emojis?
|
| Yes or No?
| Ceiling wrote:
| Emoji: a small digital image or icon used to express an
| idea, emotion, etc.
|
| Often times, yes.
| jfk13 wrote:
| > '' aka (U+F8FF)
|
| In passing: Many HN readers on non-Apple platforms
| probably don't see the glyph you intended in this
| comment. The Apple logo does not exist as a character in
| the Unicode standard. U+F8FF is a Private Use Area
| codepoint, which has no standardised, interoperable
| meaning.
|
| Yes, Apple uses this codepoint for the logo in their
| fonts, but that's purely a private matter, largely
| restricted to their platforms. (I wouldn't be surprised
| if non-Apple fonts that include it are actually violating
| a trademark, or something like that.)
| rvz wrote:
| > Many HN readers on non-Apple platforms probably don't
| see the glyph you intended in this comment.
|
| That is the whole point of my comments. They cannot ever
| see it unless they are running on an Apple platform.
| Unless they wanted to see an empty box, the symbol is
| meaningless to non-Apple users. That is why I asked _'
| Can you see it?'_
|
| Even posting the 'U+261A' glyph here on HN renders
| nothing and a box on other sites and that is defined in
| the standard; but they still cannot see it.
|
| So that is a definite 'No' then for '' aka (U+F8FF) and
| the same for 'U+261A'? OK.
|
| It has been indirectly admitted. Case closed.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I think it is important to see it in its context, as an icon
| for "the finger of contempt" rather than the typical use of a
| manicule as a bullet point in an index or to connect some
| annotation with some text. That seems somewhat similar to the
| use of emoji today.
| robin_reala wrote:
| For a use in literature, see letter 229 from _Clarissa Harlowe_
| : https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-
| richardson/clarissa...
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(page generated 2021-09-06 23:01 UTC)