That Mysterious J (2006)

Raymond

In electronic mail from Microsoft workers, you would safe a stray J esteem this one at the discontinue of a message from Rico Mariani. About a of you would witness it; others may per chance presumably not. What’s the take care of the J?

The J started out its existence as a smiley-face. The WingDings font puts a smiley face where the letter J goes. Here, let me strive: J outcomes in J. As the message travels from machine to machine, the font formatting may per chance presumably get misplaced or mangled, ensuing within the letter J appearing when a smiley face used to be supposed. (Point to that here is just not the same because the smiling face incorporated into Unicode as U+263A, which seems esteem this: ☺. About a of you would witness it; others may per chance presumably not.)

I seize a chronicle (presumably apocryphal) of someone who frequently exchanged a quantity of electronic mail with Microsoft workers and who this ability that started signing their very possess messages with a J, figuring this used to be some form of Microsoft slang. The Microsoft workers who purchased the J-messages scratched their heads till they had been in a scheme to figure out how their correspondent arrived at this fabulous deduction.

And now, the mysterious J has come paunchy circle, because some of us use it satirically, intentionally correct writing a J with out setting the font, within the same manner of us making relaxing of “leet” writing may per chance presumably “by likelihood” form “1”s (and even extra absurdly, the note “one”) into a row of exclamation aspects.