An Emoji from 1803 | Hacker News Reader

An Emoji from 1803

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120 pointsdonohoe48 comments

> 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.

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)

Manicule https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_(typography)

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?

Doesn't matter what it was.

https://emojipedia.org/black-left-pointing-index/

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

 is not specified by Unicode. Why are you so angry?

A very simple question: Is '' aka (U+F8FF) and 'U+261A' emojis?

Yes or No?

Emoji: a small digital image or icon used to express an idea, emotion, etc.

Often times, yes.

> '' 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.)

> 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.

Yes

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.

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.

For a use in literature, see letter 229 from Clarissa Harlowe: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/samuel-richardson/clarissa...

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

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.

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.

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.

Equally interesting is "it's twitter from 1803" - "TO THE PUBLIC" it was called back then.

ha true. also a touch of those trashy "you won't believe what happened next" ads

Imagine, you could actually see adverts for real "snake oil"!

Traditionally, we'd just have called that a dingbat. (See U+261E, in the long-established Dingbats block of Unicode.)

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

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.

"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.

> 6. (obsolete) A man without good breeding or worth; an ignoble or mean man.

from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fellow

“Braggadocio” is due for a revival.

U+261E FINGER OF CONTEMPT

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) .

The Dreadful Flying Glove (Yellow Submarine, 1968) suddenly feels all the more menacing.

https://yellowsubmarine.fandom.com/wiki/The_Dreadful_Flying_...

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.

Before this, the earliest example that people had found was 1862

https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/hfo-emoticon/

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)

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.

The server redirects me to err 503 after a short moment.

Here's an archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20210818212153/https://cityroom....

Hmm. Still works for me but thank you for providing the archive URL.

Love Isaac Newton's use of the manicule: https://log.nikhil.io/posts/78a93e2073695830831f94eb80032ace...

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.

wouldn’t egyptian hieroglyphs count as them from waay back ?

No, because they weren't (as far as I know?) used within a body of text written using a different alphabet system?

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.

I expected to have cause to say "that's not an emoji, that's an emoticon", but I did not have such cause.

its a tricky one. FInger of contempt = awful, bad Two fingers of contempt pointing in the same direction = aaayyyyy

soooo curious how Otho H.W. Lockett responded ... seems like a potential pistols at dawn type of scenario

https://yeoldenews.tumblr.com/post/617391302806568960/yeolde...

damn! ask and ye shall receive. so cool. thanks :)

Wow, he gave him the finger!

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