@enf @shadychars @widespacer New discoveries in the tricolon mystery.
I found an old Sholes & Glidden document and got it scanned. I see three uses.
1) “semigraphics,” which we knew of before.pic.twitter.com/8pFFHEYRgG
You can add location information to your Tweets, such as your city or precise location, from the web and via third-party applications. You always have the option to delete your Tweet location history. Learn more
…aaaaaand Mark Twain is using the tricolon as parentheses also.pic.twitter.com/GQ17Mqi7QY
Found a 1872 letter from C. L. Sholes himself using a tricolon to construct a dollar sign. Earliest use of tricolon I know of, plus it comes from the inventor!pic.twitter.com/HivmXCINRL
Interesting! I'd be inclined to think that all of these uses are secondary, to an extent - the typist could have used at least one or more other characters in each case. The “$” is clever, but perhaps a happy accident...?
Yeah, I wonder how much of this was planned for. Although here’s a new idea: what if there were no primary uses? What if this was just some sort of a universal weird unclaimed character you could mold to do your bidding?
Huh, it's a thing: https://www.charbase.com/205d-unicode-tricolon …
And for those playing along at home, here's another link with a suspicious name mentioned at the start.... http://widespacer.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-lost-key-of-qwerty.html …
My guess is that, as a non-standard character, they had multiple uses in mind originally. Which one was first or primary is probably not recoverable and perhaps not even relevant.
That precisely matches how I started thinking about it seeing all the above.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.