theoldwolf

Ship arriving too late to save a drowning witch

If you've never heard of "Droodles," you're probably a lot younger than me. The original book was published in 1953, but now the younger generation has a chance to go wild in the same vein with the Fake Unicode Consortium.

The idea: Take an unusual Unicode character, and give it a brand-new name or interpretation.

Here is one of my favorites:

Unicode character "KATAKANA LETTER NI" (U+30CB)

Unicode character "KATAKANA LETTER EKKE EKKE EKKE EKKE PTANGYA ZIIINNGGGGGGG NI" (U+2A6A5)

I've also seen it spelled "Icky-icky-icky-kapang-zoop-boing", but they have used the official designation found on the "script" subtitles of the collector's edition DVD. However it's really spelled, I give them full credit for the joke.

And in case you're wondering what that monstrous 64-stroke character really is, in Mandarin it's pronounced "zhé" and means "verbose;" this character fell from use around the 5th century, however. It is composed of the character 龍 (dragon) written four times. In Japanese its an uncommon ("Hyōgai", meaning outside of the normal kanji charts) character pronounced "techi" or "tetsu", but no meaning is given.