@enf @glennf What do you think this “r.” is? (Also, note two quotation marks!)pic.twitter.com/rZVuAwFAJk
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It's still a shifted character, though, unless this hypothetical missing link had a punctuation row instead of a digits row
The theory posits it was unshifted before, and someone just liked it aesthetically. (Same with the opening/closing quotation marks.) Then other people or market forces requested more punctuation, and those – and the tricolon – were first to go.
I can't think of a commercial or legal term for which it would be the symbol. I like the theory that it was for a kerned or superscript r. so you wouldn't have the unsightly monospaced combo (which could be mistaken for a period) in abbreviations like Mr. or Dr. or Fr.
My new theory is that it is a weird cursive percent sign. Compare the character to the right of the "O" in two illustrations in https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/c9/63/55/c736166f64a17e/US339129.pdf …. In one it could be mistaken for a cursive "r," and in the other it is clearly a percent signpic.twitter.com/aAgT3SCoPP
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