http://norman.walsh.name/2004/06/09/U0298 7 97 2004-06-09T13:55:00-04:00 $Date: 2005-09-11 10:27:02 -0400 (Sun, 11 Sep 2005) $ Norman Walsh 2004 Norman Walsh Some things it takes a standards committee to name. O. W. Holmes The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts good deal longer. I happened to stumble across Sean B. Palmer ’s bot “phenny” in the #rdfig channel on Freenode. One of the things phenny can do is identify Unicode code points so I asked her to find “bullseye”. She reported: 0298: LATIN LETTER BILABIAL CLICK 25CE: BULLSEYE Nevermind the rest of the discussion (though it’s logged if you really care), just think about the name of U0298: “bilabial click.” I didn’t give the name any thought until a few minutes later when Sean says to me “but don't send it to anyone that you wouldn't kiss in real life.” When the penny finally dropped I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair. With apologies to linguists and other fans of phonetics. Come to think of it, maybe they’re responsible for the name of the character too, but I’m going to leave the cheap shot in place because I serve on a lot of committees and it’s true even if this is a bad example. Ok, maybe it’s just me. For what it’s worth, on my display in Firefox, I think the kiss “ʘ” makes a better looking bullseye than the bullseye “◎” but I suppose that’s neither here nor there.