Unicode’s “Pile of Poo” character by Cory Doctorow.
From the post:
For many years, most of the Internet ran on ASCII, a character set that had a limited number of accents and diacriticals, and which didn’t support non-Roman script at all. Unicode, a massive, sprawling replacement, has room for all sorts of characters and alphabets, and can be extended with “private use areas” that include support for Klingon.
But for all that, I never dreamt that Unicode was so vast as to contain a special character for a “pile of poo.”
See Cory’s post for the glyph in question.
I don’t know which of the following is the least surprising:
- That Unicode has a character for a “pile of poo.”
- That Cory Doctorow found a character in Unicode for a “pile of poo.”
- That Cory Doctorow routinely checks character sets for “pile of poo” characters.
Perhaps equally unsurprising. 😉
I will put this down as another fact I would not know but for Cory Doctorow.
(Truth be told, Cory is a gifted writer, transparency advocate, in addition to being a “poo hunter.”)
Cory actually discovered this via jwz:
http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/02/unicode-character-pile-of-poo-u1f4a9/
I’m not sure how jwz found it, but he does strike me as the sort who might go looking for such things.
Comment by marijane — February 10, 2012 @ 5:28 pm
😉
I haven’t looked at the Egyptian Hieroglyphic set recently but even a modest character set will have suggestive glyphs.
Comment by Patrick Durusau — February 13, 2012 @ 11:07 am