by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2008/04/20 19:31 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/04/20/8413125.aspx
Content of Michael Kaplan's personal blog not approved by Microsoft (see disclaimer)!
Regular readers should keep in mind that all I said in The End? still applies; the allusion to the X-Files continues for people who understand such references....
If you are easily offended then please stop reading now....
I had a regular reader ask for assistance very urgently on kind of a personal matter, and although I am usually immune to such requests, I decided to make an exception in this case.
It relates to my blog While vacationing, idle random thoughts on the potential influence of Unicode on 'alphabet soup'.
He initially found that his knowledge of Hiragana and Katakana led to the generally positive results I suggested:
If you ask, I will deny any personal knowledge of what I am about suggest, but if you are thinking in this direction and you know some Japanese then considering slow Hiragana eventually transitioning into slightly more rapid Katakana, in iroha order if you can manage it (again, without reciting the poem!) for reasons that are very complicated to get into but if you look at the orders you might have some hints, really can inspire miracles. Similar effects are possible with most "curvy" scripts (e.g. the handwritten form of Hebrew, Tamil, Telugu, Georgian) moving into less curvy ones (e.g. Armenian, Bengali, Devanagari); the Latin alphabet really seems less suited to the whole effect though if you know no other alphabets then lowercase to uppercase and maybe sans-serif to serif might have the (for lack of a better word) "appropriate" impact....
Unfortunately, the implementation in this case coincided with an out-of-town business trip, which it apparently led to a bit of suspicion -- in this case suspicion of infidelity.
I guess you could say that somethings things can work too well? :-(
Of course I am a huge fan of trying new things and being creative in order to facilitate a relationship which is more interesting and fresh, but perhaps I should have suggested a more measured pace in the introduction of new things if the actual introduction of new things is itself a new thing. Although it does seem slightly out of scope, I would want to add neither chaos nor disharmony, then simply arguing such a technicality technicality in my defense, so the warning seems (for lack of a better word) proper.
My advice, should one find oneself in such a situation, to come clean about the alphabet thing -- but if you can focus on the words being spelled out (iroha order is if nothing else quite a nice poem, and a nice song lyric or poem of any sort can't ever hurt!) rather than focusing on the alphabet itself, which is not particularly sexy to anyone who doesn't have crush on Big Bird!
Coming (for lack of a better word) clean is not such a bad way to go in this case, and even if there was no words or poem then one will likely find that alphabet is something easy to prove in the (for lack of a better word) appropriate situation
If everything goes wrong you can always point to the blog as where the idea came from, I believe it might go over better than some of the other available sources of this information. General overall happiness should quickly follow.... :-)
This post brought to you by ৡ and ৠ (U+09e1 and U+09e0, aka BENGALI LETTER VOCALIC LL and BENGALI LETTER VOCALIC RR)
# Alvin on 20 Apr 2008 8:05 PM:
I'm a big fan of Douglas Adams, like you.
Isn't this post like the instructions on a toothpick box?
# Michael S. Kaplan on 20 Apr 2008 8:46 PM:
Hey Alvin,
That's one way of looking at it, though if one is new to this sort of thing one may not know what to expect, so I'd rather give people the benefit of their doubts.
Not that I have any personal knowledge of any of this or anything. :-)