Tweet of the Day, I Salute This Man’s Tilt At The Windmill edition.

There are worse causes than full-contact orthography.

Aussie restaurateur, Paul Mathis has invented a new letter of the alphabet to replace the word “the” because he thinks it is more efficient.

The letter looks like the Cyrillic letter ‘Ћ’. If an upper case T and a lower case h were to have a typographic baby, this is what it would look like.

Mathis has invested $38,000 into developing the symbol which he would like to see added as a 27th letter of the alphabet.

Although Dana has it right, alas:

 

10 thoughts on “Tweet of the Day, I Salute This Man’s Tilt At The Windmill edition.”

  1. I think I would use it, simply for the uniqueness factor. Of course, that’d require it actually being on my keyboard first…

    On a side note, it’s high time we freed ourselves of the speed-shackling limitations of the QWERTY hegemony.

  2. This is almost as stupid as the people who put a slash through their sevens. Somehow they think that because the French are too dumb to make a proper 1 they have to alter the 7 to avoid confusion.

  3. We used to have a letter somewhat like that: Eth, for the “th” sound, written “ð”. It dropped out long ago and was mostly forgotten, but it’s where we moderns mistakenly get the “y” in “Ye Olde…”

    Personally, I think we should all switch to Enochian.

  4. Capital thorn: Þ
    Small thorn: þ

    I’m led to believe the y was actually used by early typesetters in place of a thorn because Continental typesetting systems did not include a thorn character.

    1. This.
      .
      Also, I work with a lot of Icelanders and see mail from Thor, Throstur, Thorhallur, etc., all of which use the thorn.

  5. It’s good to have what I like to call Pet Hopeless Causes, of which this is a fine example. One of mine is to renumber the Beltway around DC from I-295 to I-666.

  6. What was the $40,000 spent on? My kids could have given him 50 new letters and I’d only charge him a couple boxes of cereal and some gogurt.

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