I'm not sure where it came from originally, but I do know that gmail chat has used these for some time to mean _italics_ and *bold*. The chat box converts them automatically.
But now they're being used without any conversion, and I have to wonder...
Am I the only one who thinks that it looks a whole lot more like *wink, wink* than *emphasis*?
And this really destroys the intended message.
1 comment:
If I'm not mistaken, the italics and bold meaning predates instant messaging and gmail. I don't know where to reference this though. The use of asterisks around visual signals may have originated with the same being automatically converted by some instant messengers into emoticons, or may have predated that and been taken up by a few (most just convert the traditional smileys instead anyway), I don't know which. However, given the non-verbal signal use of asterisks, when I need to make emphasis and am too lazy to use make italics or bold properly I usually use underscores to avoid confusion. I've also heard a theory that the use of asterisks for emphasis is "mistranslated" (and I mean those quotation marks properly), so to speak, into misuse of quotation marks that makes so many signs weird nowadays, though if many people can't tell that those symbols in particular have a special meaning that precludes use for mere emphasis then English as I know it is a dead language. Oh, wait, I already think American English is a dead language (the British I'm not sure if it's survived or not, but ours has been replaced by a combination of slang and 'leet... that is also why I will never manage to make myself avoid British spellings: more of the stuff I read these days that's spelled correctly at all is literature old enough to be from England and therefore with British spelling).
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