so those who follow me here probably have noticed that i use U+00A6 ¦ BROKEN BAR as my apostrophe character.
it is probably not surprising that this ultimately derives from a beef with Unicode. the Unicode Standard believes that the correct character for the apostrophe is U+2019 ’ RIGHT QUOTATION MARK. this is problematic because that is obviously the character that we use in English to close single‐quoted text. an apostrophe has a different function than closing a quote, so it stands to reason that it should have a different character. you could argue that this is a flaw in the English typesetting tradition and not in Unicode, but the point remains.
i am not alone in thinking this. many Internet publications which otherwise use curly quotes still use U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE as their apostrophe character, distinguishing it from the close‐quote character in text. Unicode however does not recommend using U+0027 ' APOSTROPHE if you can possibly avoid it.
so i use U+00A6 ¦ BROKEN BAR. this character has a number of desirable properties:
• the top half of it looks like a straight apostrophe
• it is narrow and fairly unobtrusive
• its visual effect of dividing a word into two components, but doing so incompletely, reflects the apostrophes role of indicating omission or contraction
• it is a character with virtually universal support in fonts and computer systems despite having no existing practical usage
what you may not realize is that in handwriting, i do not write this character the way it looks on the screen. i actually write a lightning‐bolt character (like ⚡️ but reversed), ostensibly because it allows me to write the character with·out picking up my pen. the horizontal line in the lightning‐bolt indicates the “break” while the vertical components indicate the top and bottom portions of the “bar”.
compare U+A746 ꝇ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER BROKEN L and its lowercase equivalent.
so anyway, last night i was sleeping, and i was dreaming, and in my dream i was reading a book of strange stories written for children. interestingly, the book i was reading had chosen to typeset apostrophes as broken bars similar to how i do in real life. even more interesting, the broken bar glyph that they chose looked completely unlike any glyph i had ever imagined for it: it placed two dots, one at baseline and one at midline, and extended vertical bars upwards until the lower bar touched the upper dot.
this actually looked pretty good in practice! but things got even more interesting: my dream‐typesetter decided that the shape of the glyph should change when the punctuation which immediately followed was an exclamation point or a question mark. that is, the first broken bar in ‹ whomst¦d¦ve. ›, ‹ whomst¦d¦ve? ›, and ‹ whomst¦d¦ve! › was always the same, but the second one varied in shape.
i have attached an image of me trying to recreate these alternatives this morning after i woke up:
