<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43053419">Comments</a>

The Schumer email chain went so far afield that some were even trying to land dates from the list.

I was reading through Juan's recent Almanac entry for the @counter-style at-rule and I'll be darned if he didn't uncover and unpack some extremely interesting

<div class="entry-meta"><span class="posted-on"><a href="https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2025/01/miscellany-104-new-year-new-miscellany/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published" datetime="2025-01-17T15:44:54+00:00">January 17, 2025</time></a></span></div> <p class="series-meta">This is the most recent in a series of one hundred six posts on <a class="series-link" href="https://shadycharacters.co.uk/series/miscellany/">Miscellany</a>. Start at <a href="https://shadycharacters.co.uk/?post_type=post&amp;p=164">PART 1</a> or view <a href="https://shadycharacters.co.uk/series/miscellany/">ALL POSTS</a> in the series.</p> <hr/> <p>Hello, and welcome to 2025. Is it that time already?</p> <hr/> <p>The possessive apostrophe (or rather, the abuse of the possessive apostrophe) is a <a href="https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2024/06/miscellany-101/">recurrent</a> <a href="https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2013/03/miscellany-27/">guest star</a> here at <cite>Shady Characters</cite>, but usually in the English language. Recently, though, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/07/germany-influence-of-english-idiots-apostrophe">the <cite>Guardian</cite> reported</a> that unneeded apostrophes are infecting German, too. The so-called <i>Deppenapostroph</i>, or “idiot’s apostrophe”, appears when a German-language expression uses it to indicate a possessive — despite the fact that it is more correct to add an “s” on its own rather than “’s”.</p> <p>Compare and contrast with the summer kerfuffle chronicled at <cite>Language Log</cite>, in which <a href="https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=65439">Mark Libermann summarises a spat</a> over how to add the possessive to the surnames of those on the Democratic party’s erstwhile presidential ticket. Is it “Harris’” or “Harris’s”? “Walz’” or “Walz’s”? All happy languages are alike, one might say; each unhappy language is unhappy in its own way.</p> <p><a href="https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=65439">Head to Language Log</a> to get Libermann’s professional (and sensible) take on the matter.</p> <hr/> <p>In <a href="https://shadycharacters.co.uk/books/face-with-tears-of-joy"><cite>Face With Tears of Joy</cite></a>, (available now to preorder at <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Face-Tears-Joy-Natural-History/dp/1324075147/">Amazon</a> and <a href="https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/face-with-tears-of-joy-a-natural-history-of-emoji-keith-houston/7763425">Bookshop.org</a>!), I write a little about the mysterious, blank-faced Unicode characters (□, � and others) that sometimes pop up when a computer or smartphone doesn’t support the latest emoji. I was happy to see <a href="https://www.thomasphinney.com/2024/12/notdef-emoji-symbol-x-rectangle/">an in-depth treatment of those same characters</a> pop up at the website of Thomas Phinney, a typographer and font expert.</p> <p>If Thomas’s name is familiar, it’s because <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/the-font-detectives/">he has in the past helped detect fraud by means of minute inspections of printed text</a> and the application of a detailed knowledge of different fonts’ features and quirks. There’s lots to read on that subject and others at <a href="https://www.thomasphinney.com/">his website</a>!</p> <hr/> <p>Although it didn’t start life as an emoji, the fact that the peace sign (☮️) has been inducted into Unicode’s hallowed emoji halls is an indication of how potent a symbol it is. Or perhaps, how potent a symbol it <em>was</em>. At the <cite>New York Times</cite>, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/style/peace-sign-protest-war.html">Michael Rock isn’t sure that ☮️ carries the same weight it once did</a>. What’s your take? Are we in danger of losing this once-contentious, once-ubiquitous symbol?</p> <hr/> <p>That’s all for this week! Happy new year, and may your 2025 be filled with information technologies of the most unorthodox sort.</p> <hr/> <p class="post-meta"><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/">CC BY-SA 2.0</a> featured image courtesy of <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikecogh/53488550989/">Michael Coghlan</a>.)</p>