Originally published at: The mystery of ⍼, a Unicode character of unknown purpose | Boing Boing
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Line goes down!
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I always label my vials of adrenochrome with that one. I hope I’m in line with current satanic new world order style guides.
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Can we just use it as a generic symbol for cryptocurrency?
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Looks like electron tunneling from a potential well
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You mean to say there’s only ONE useless Unicode character?
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It might be a symbol for an attempt to do a Scandinavian flick with an awful timing. A handful of rally journalists could save some time if they would start using this this symbol.
“Didier’s day started miserably after he experienced ⍼ in the 3rd special stage”. He dropped several places due his mistake.
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The article notes that it is very similar to the “linking sigil” used by chaos magicians to connect places or situations of magikckal power. It just needs the addition of a dot and some extra arrowheads, which could probably be achieved through the use of combining diacritical marks already present in Unicode (e.g. for Vietnamese script).
So there may well exist a 10- to 16-byte string that could short out the entire magkikckal fabrick of the interknet, with a result much like the Season 5 finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
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TL;DR: He gave up investigating when the research would have required more than googling (ie. phoning people to see who might have paper records of the character requests). No judgement on that- he’s a CS student, not a reporter. Conclusion is that it was imported with large random sets of characters from other standards at the start of Unicode, which were themselves filled with weird user-generated cruft because they were less well curated than Unicode itself now is.
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Somewhere out there an artist with a rather boring name is looking at this symbol and thinking “Hmmmm”.
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It’s a neo-Nazi symbol, isn’t it? 
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Hazard symbol for “Electrical charge may exit container, boundary or barrier. Not an insulating surface.”
Just made that up.
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Be careful: when used in the correct context, Angzarr indicates to the Simulators one’s desire to leave the Simulation.
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It’s the recognition symbol for Russian forces invading (insert name of country).
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Oh, right; neo-Nazis. 
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The conclusion seems to be that the name was derived from an inscrutable symbol in some ancient document, but if I was just given the description “right angle with downwards zigzag arrow”, I might very well draw something like this.
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Isn’t it the logo for the band Satan’s Lover? I mean, it even has the pointy tail on the “S”
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Has anyone printed three of them out and then looked at the reflection of them in a mirror?
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