August 18, 2009

Le point d'ironie et l'interrobáng tué nos visagelivres!

In May, I wrote about the interrobang (‽) & the irony mark (), & other unfairly marginalized punctuation. My brother had changed his facebooks' name to "Lee ‽ Welsch". It irritated my mother, so I changed mine to "James ؟ Welsch".
Here's the wikipedia's history of the irony mark:

This mark ؟ was proposed by the French poet Alcanter de Brahm (alias Marcel Bernhardt) at the end of the 19th century. It was in turn taken by Hervé Bazin in his book Plumons l’Oiseau (1966), in which the author proposes several other innovative punctuation marks, such as the doubt point () certitude point (), acclamation point (), authority point (), indignation point (), and love point ().

Its form is essentially the same as the late medieval , a percontation point (punctus percontativus), which was used to mark rhetorical questions.
Anyway, my facebooks' account was deactivated last week. It's very abrupt when they do that to you, everything you've done, comments & pictures & everything, is just suddenly missing, like christians after the rapture. And I couldn't figure out how I could have "violated their terms of service." After a week of waiting & several e-mails to their "deactivated" help center, I got this message:

from"The Facebook Team" appeals+n1bnanq@facebook.com
reply-to"The Facebook Team" appeals+n1bnanq@facebook.com
to_@itwaslost.org
dateMon, Aug 17, 2009 at 3:47 PM
subjectRe: My account was disabled by mistake!

Hi James,

Please note that we have standardized your name information, as the use of special characters is not permitted. We apologize for any inconvenience. If you have any further questions, please visit our Help Center at the following address:

http://www.facebook.com/help.php

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Tatsuya
User Operations
Facebook

So I guess it's a bit ambiguous, if that's the reason the account was deleted, or just a symptom of it being reinstated. It seems a strange reason to deactivate an account, four months after I've had my irony mark middle name, without any warning. Anyway, it was restored seemingly completely in tact.

My brother wrote today: "farewell to the interrobang", & I responded "The standardized name nazis can't handle special characters." Here's our original post about the interrobang. No one yet has responded to the commission to create an outgribation point or patriotism mark.

2 comments:

S. Sandrigon said...

I'm inaugurating an era of using more poor French in post titles. It adds a certain, how would you say it, "I don't know what", to the blog.

Brains said...

ha ha