Doug Wyatt at Sonosphere reports the bumper sticker I � UNICODE. He observes that depending on your OS, browser, font inventory and miscellaneous settings, your computer may be recreating the joke by an alternative route.
Anyone who tried to use Unicode a decade ago might have been tempted to decorate their bumper in a different emotional direction: F��K UNICODE. This is no longer a well motivated point of view, occasional annoying blips aside. But the idea does suggest a connection between the practice of displaying glyphs such as � or □ for character codes that are not available in the current font, and the practice of substituting asterisks (or hyphens or underscores) as typographical bleeps for certain letters, in order to avoid violating lexical taboos. (Does anyone know who invented typographical bleeping, and when? Perhaps it was inspired by the practice of disguising names in forms like S____, which seems to be older.)
As the conventional lexical taboos lose their force, the practice of typographical bleeping can be used ironically, as documented in email by Paul Kay:
Arnold Zwicky cites with approval the admonition of the Guardian Style Guide (via Chris Waigl) regarding the use of asterisks to evoke taboo words without actually printing them: "Finally, never use asterisks, which are just a copout." Fundamentally sound, I think, but like most useful admonitions this one admits of the occasional exception. Recently spotted in Berkeley, where I live, a home-made bumper sticker:
FUCK B**HI'm sure this was inspired by David Lodge's 1975 novel, Changing Places, in which the governor of California was named Ronald Duck (remember who was governor of California from 1966 to 1974?) and Berkeley student protestors displayed signs saying "FUCK D**K".
Actually, the passage in Lodge's novel refers not to bumper stickers or to protest signs but to lapel buttons. For those of you who haven't read it, the book starts like this:
High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. [..] Although they had never met, the two men were known to each other by name. They were, in fact, in process of exchanging posts for the next six months ...
Philip Swallow is on his way from the University of Rummidge to Euphoric State for his half of the exchange, and on pp. 48-49 of the 1979 Penguin edition he's still up in the air:
Meanwhile, Philip Swallow is wondering more desperately than ever when this flight is going to end. Charles Boon has been talking at him for hours, it seems, permitting few interruptions. All about the political situation in Euphoria in general and on the Euphoric State campus in particular. The factions, the issues, the confrontations: Governor Duck, Chancellor Binde, Mayor Holmes, Sheriff O'Keene; the Third World, the Hippies, the Black Panthers, the Faculty Liberals; pot, Black Studies, sexual freedom, ecology, free speech, police violence, ghettoes, fair housing, school busing, Viet Nam; strikes, arson, marches, sit-ins, teach-ins, love-ins, happenings. Philip has long since given up trying to follow the details of Boon's argument, but the general drift seems to be concisely summed up by his lapel buttons:
LEGALIZE POT
NORMAN O. BROWN FOR PRESIDENT
SAVE THE BAY: MAKE WATER NOT WAR
KEEP THE DRAFT CARDS BURNING
THERE IS A FAULT IN REALITY -- NORMAL SERVICE WILL RETURN SHORTLY
HAPPINESS IS (just is)
KEEP GOD OUT OF AMERICA
BOYCOTT GRAPES
KEEP KROOP
SWINGING SAVES
BOYCOTT TRUFFLES
FUCK D*CKIn spite of himself, Philip is amused by some of the slogans. Obviously it is a new literary medium, the lapel button, something between the classical epigram and the imagist lyric.
Back in 2006, Arnold Zwicky pointed out in response to Paul Kay's note that the "fuck D*CK" usage preserves the concept that some words are viewed as too obscene to display in public, and forwarded an email from Nate Dorward, reading in part:
I remember that when the play Shopping and Fucking was in the news a lot, prompting a lot of euphemisms & bleeping in reviews &c, one quick-witted writer at a newspaper referred to it as "Sh---ing and Fucking". Wish I had a cite for that for you.....
Paul Kay commented:
Since Shopping and Fucking was first produced in 1996, the coiner of 'Sh---ing' may also have had access to Lodge's 1975 novel.
And so do you. If you haven't read it, or haven't read it recently, by all means do so.
[Update -- Ben Zimmer points out:
You can also get "I � Unicode" on a T-shirt...
http://www.cafepress.com/nucleartacos.26721820
Chris Waigl was asking for one back in November...
http://serendipity.lascribe.net/odds-ends/2005/11/t-shirt/
It's embarrassing that I didn't notice/remember that! Chris was way ahead of me on this one, as she often is.]
Posted by Mark Liberman at June 7, 2006 07:11 AM