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Despite seeing it millions of times in pretty much every picture book, every novel, every newspaper and every email message, people are essentially unaware of the more common version of the lowercase print letter "g," Johns Hopkins researchers have found.
Most people don't even know that two forms of the letter -- one usually handwritten, the other typeset -- exist. And if they do, they can't write the typeset one we usually see. They can't even pick the correct version of it out of a lineup.
[...] Unlike most letters, "g" has two lowercase print versions. There's the opentail one that most everyone uses when writing by hand; it looks like a loop with a fishhook hanging from it. Then there's the looptail g, which is by far the more common, seen in everyday fonts like Times New Roman and Calibri and, hence, in most printed and typed material.
Source: http://releases.jhu.edu/2018/04/03/jhu-finds-letter-weve-seen-millions-of-times-yet-cant-write/
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @07:16AM (3 children)
> Dafuq is this all about ?
Indeed. I use the closed-loop version myself (to distinguish it from my number 9), and I've never had any inquiries about it. Maybe it's a US-only problem, like guns or healthcare? *ducks*
BTW, my favorites are the handwritten lowercase letter "q" and the number "9". The way most people here in Japan write them, they look the same - the hook in 9 goes straight down, so it looks like q. Sometimes it's a problem when writing equations on a whiteboard. Surely you could ask which one it is, you say? Ah, but there's the kicker: in Japanese, they're both pronounced exactly the same: kyuu (キュウ).
How the hell did it happen that the old Japanese word for 9 is exactly the same as the English pronunciation of the letter q, is one of those linguistical mysteries that will forever elude our mortal comprehension :)
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @08:21AM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @09:38AM
Well, yeah, I meant "old" as in "before Western influence". Should've used "native". 反省.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @12:45PM
Show them the upper-case cursive "Q" and it will blow their minds!