Somehow it is always Russian technologists and designers who sweat this type of stuff the most and want to talk about it. When I moved from Russia to a western country in my teenage years, as a fledging web developer and previously an avid Kovodstvo [1] reader, I remember feeling upset, surprised, and deeply disappointed by the state of the real-world English language - particularly when it came to punctuation. It shocked me to see how loose and vibe-y it was, even in professional contexts. Nowadays, I understand that the majority of the world’s population has a much more casual relationship with the formal rules of their language, if those exist at all, compared to the hyper-pedantic Russians. I’m not one to say who really should be learning from whom.
I’m not a typographic nut (though I care about it more than the average American), but one of the worst trends I’ve seen is to use the square root character (√) as a checkmark (). I’ve even seen Apple do it. It doesn’t help that the checkmark glyph is generally terrible, and at least on a Mac, the shortcut (⌥+V) exists for square root, and happens to be something a Windows user might accidentally find when transitioning to Mac key bindings while the checkmark requires either knowing true code point and how to enter that in or going to the Emoji & Symbols panel.
For 99.9% of people, as long as the meaning is clear, they’ll never even register that the wrong code point, wrong symbol, or even wrong formatting was used. While I prefer correctness when possible, I’ve come to terms that others only care about communicating their intent.
> to use the square root character (√) as a checkmark ([filtered out])
IMHO that's an old-school-ism: I've never seen that in the post-Unicode world, but I recall its being common in the days of PC-compatibles, when square root was one of the ~256 characters you got, and checkmark wasn't, so you made do. In the same bucket with "using eszett (ß) as a lowercase beta (β)" or "using upper-half-of-integral (⌠) as a long S (ſ)." In fact Wikipedia's footnotes mention all three of these substitutions. (Or "using hyphen-minus (-) as a minus sign (−)." ;))
There’s a quick note about the interrobang (‽) at the end. I’ve long had it in my macOS/iOS text replacement config, but nearly every font renders it so poorly that I usually manually retype the characters. It looks like a typographical mistake more often than communicating the questioned surprise that’s intended.
There was a push a few years ago by some modern fonts (as illustrated in the article) to place the overlapping exclamation and question mark at a 30-45° from each other while sharing the same dot below, which is a huge improvement, but I doubt older fonts will ever be updated.
1: https://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/
For 99.9% of people, as long as the meaning is clear, they’ll never even register that the wrong code point, wrong symbol, or even wrong formatting was used. While I prefer correctness when possible, I’ve come to terms that others only care about communicating their intent.
IMHO that's an old-school-ism: I've never seen that in the post-Unicode world, but I recall its being common in the days of PC-compatibles, when square root was one of the ~256 characters you got, and checkmark wasn't, so you made do. In the same bucket with "using eszett (ß) as a lowercase beta (β)" or "using upper-half-of-integral (⌠) as a long S (ſ)." In fact Wikipedia's footnotes mention all three of these substitutions. (Or "using hyphen-minus (-) as a minus sign (−)." ;))
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437
[2] - https://knowware.dk/dos56/norton-commander-1.shtml — see the last two screenshots on this page, from Norton Commander
There was a push a few years ago by some modern fonts (as illustrated in the article) to place the overlapping exclamation and question mark at a 30-45° from each other while sharing the same dot below, which is a huge improvement, but I doubt older fonts will ever be updated.
Manual: •.,:;…!?·
(Except printed in a really cool font!)