by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/02/06 10:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/02/06/525486.aspx
(No, the title of this post does not contain a typo!)
I have a regular reader of this blog who is a 12 year old young man named Dean.
He has an interesting take on my post There is no such thing as a surrogate character (dammit!).
Although he did not really follow all of the Unicode take on the evilness of the term "surrogate character," he pointed out that the real problem was not that "there is no such thing as a surrogate character" at all.
He suggested that we should allow people to call these characters that are made up of two surrogate code units by a simple term:
A SURROGATES CHARACTER
(the emphasis is mine)
When he first suggested it, I went back through previous mails from Dean that convinced me his age claim was genuine (up to and including his delight that I used the word dammit in a post title!).
It struck me as a much more brilliant compromise that more accurately resolves the problem of the natural tendency people seem to have to call these entities "surrogate characters" by shifting the battlefield in such a way that the language mavens, the grammar police, and the wordinistas can start battling for us!
And to be honest, Dean suggested that some of these mavens could perhaps help the cause, citing this post and several Language Log posts on the language maven issue.
Why not have these busybodies do some work for us, just for a change? :-)
Clearly there are two surrogate code units there, so calling the two of them a surrogate character is an obvious pluralization mismatch.
What do you think?
In my opinion, a touchdown (with the extra point), a field goal, and a safety for Dean, 12 points that the Seahawks could have used to win the Super Bowl yesterday! :-(
This post brought to you by "𐠠" (U+10820, a.k.a. U+d802 U+dc20, a.k.a. CYPRIOT SYLLABLE PI, a proud surrogates character!)
# Chris on 6 Feb 2006 1:24 PM:
# Ben Bryant on 6 Feb 2006 1:24 PM:
# Maurits [MSFT] on 6 Feb 2006 7:28 PM:
# Michael S. Kaplan on 6 Feb 2006 8:06 PM:
# Steve on 7 Feb 2006 8:05 AM:
# Michael S. Kaplan on 7 Feb 2006 10:29 AM:
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