2954: Bracket Symbols

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Bracket Symbols

Title text: ’"‘”’" means "I edited this text on both my phone and my laptop before sending it"

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Created by a ([{《"complicated function"》}]) - Please~~ change this comment when editing this page. Do *NOT* delete this tag too soon. If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

Brackets, also called parentheses, are typographical symbols used to delimit a section of text. Unlike most typographical symbols, brackets usually come in pairs, and the end bracket is typically the mirror image of the start bracket.

This comic shows a variety of (mostly) real bracket symbols, along with Randall's description.

Descriptions

Symbols	Comic text	Real use	Explanation of the joke
()	Regular parentheses for setting stuff aside	The regular curved bracket is the most commonly used in literature, and typically denotes aside remarks that are relevant to, but not part of, a sentence (for example, a clarifying explanation). It is also frequently used in mathematical expressions and programming languages as a grouping operator, to force a particular order of evaluation.	Randall explains, accurately, that these are regular parentheses. No joke yet.
[]	Square brackets (more secure)	Used in regular text to mark still less important remarks, like glosses, omissions, translator and editorial notes etc. In mathematics, often used for matrices or closed intervals. Sometimes used as outer parentheses for easier visual matching in complicated expressions. In programming languages used to mark specific syntactic elements, like array indexes, lists etc.	The sharper edges and corners may suggest these brackets hold things in more securely, so the contents is less likely to fall out. They resemble staples used to hold things in place securely.
{}	This stuff is expensive so be careful with it	Rarely used in normal text, although may be used in expanded form to 'enclose' multiple optional lines following/preceding a single element of common purpose (similar to the 'split and recombined tracks' of 2243: Star Wars Spoiler Generator). In mathematics, usually used to denote sets, but other usage is possible. In programming languages most often used to denote begin and end of a separate block of code, but other uses are also extant.	All that graphical detail in the bracket, if manufactured as a physical object, would increase the production cost making it more expensive than "regular" brackets. Their relative rarity compared to "regular" or square brackets might also increase the monetary value. They may also look 'fancy', like gates with ornate ironwork.
"", ″‶ or “”	Someone is talking	Used to denote speech or citations in normal text. The first version is commonly used in programming languages to denote text that is not a program, such as messages displayed to the user.	Normal quotation marks. Some languages or communities use different typographical conventions such as „German quotation marks“. See also below for British and French.
'', ′‵ or ‘’	Someone British is talking	British quotation marks. Some programming languages use the first version to denote non-program text. In the Pascal family of languages, for example, ''s indicate character-class data, with ""s being string-class data.	Some British media use these to note when people are talking, though in modern usage the double quotes above are more common, while single quotes are more often used as 'scare quotes'.
‹› or <>	An Animorph is talking	Angle brackets. Aside from telepathic speech in prose, it's often used in comics to indicate that a character is speaking a foreign language that has been translated for the reader's benefit – at least notionally.	Books like the series Animorphs or science fiction novels use these when a character is communicating nonverbally, for example via telepathy.
«»	A French Animorph is talking	French quotation marks. Used for quotes within quotes in some languages. For quoting conventions in different languages, see this document.	These symbols are literally called French quotation marks and are used in French texts as the first-level quotes. Here Randall is mixing the SF convention described above with actual French use.
||	I'm scared of negative numbers but these sigils will protect me	Vertical bars in mathematics are used for the Absolute Value function.	The absolute value of a number is its value with all negative and positive signs stripped off; in practical terms this is used to ensure a given value is positive (ex. |-69| = 69). If for whatever reason you need to "protect" your equations from negative numbers (which does come up in programming from time to time) the absolute value function has you covered — though it may not always be denoted with vertical bars. Sigils are symbols used in magic, and some kinds of magic are thought to protect people from evil.
**, __, //	I have a favorite monospaced font	These symbols are conventionally used in text-based computer communications (such as emails, chats, Usenet News articles) to denote *bold*, _underlined_, or /italic/ font; some client programs interpret them and display actual bold text etc.	Monospace font is a font (set of shapes used for letters, numbers and symbols) in which every character has the same width, unlike variable-width (proportional) font, in which the letter I is much narrower than W. While proportional font is more pleasant to read, monospace is easier to represent in simple mechanical or electronic devices, and has been used almost exclusively in the advent of computer technology, specifically in text-only environments such as computer terminals; these most often had only one factory installed font. Today, a person still using these symbols is probably using a terminal emulator, which allows to select one's favorite (preferably monospace) font from a wide set of fonts installed in the operating system.
~~	I'm being sarcastic and I had a Tumblr account in 2014		Strikethrough markup commonly used on sites like Tumblr to indicate that you don't really mean something you said. This is a somewhat archaic trend, but I still use it...
[([{()}],)]	These Python functions are not getting along	The square brackets denote a mutable list, the round brackets an immutable tuple , and the curly brackets a set. It is valid to have nested them like this. [] could also be a slice (a bit of a list or tuple) and {} could be a dictionary, but the syntax is wrong for these.	Random parentheses - Spaghetti code (badly maintained or written) in programming languages including Python will often be badly organized creating a mess of indentations and brackets used to create functions or loops etc.
⌊⌋	Help, I'm a mathematician trying to work with actual numbers and they're scary	Mathematical symbols meaning "floor" (i.e. round down to the nearest lower integer).	By "actual numbers" Randall means real numbers. Unlike natural numbers, they are somewhat difficult to understand to a person learning basic mathematics and thus "scary". The "floor" operation makes a (positive) real number a natural number, thus not "scary".
∫ ∫	Why are you trying to read my violin?	There is currently no such type of bracketing used in typography. See Explanation. ∫ looks like the Integral symbol which itself is derived from a Long s. In mathematics it is usually paired with the differential of the variable of integration (e.g., dx). A reverse integral symbol is not used in Western mathematics typesetting; it occasionally appears in mathematical texts written in Arabic, along with other symbols likewise adapted to Arabic's right-to-left writing direction. The symbol also looks like a lowercase esh (ʃ), used in phonetic transcription. It has a reversed counterpart in Unicode, but it's quite a bit shorter (ʅ).	Violins are known for their characteristic F-holes.
|⟩	Don't stop here–this is quantum country	This notation is used in quantum mechanics to notate a vector. This is called a ket, and the mirrored sign ⟨| is called a bra. Combining them as bra-ket gives the inner product ⟨|⟩.	This is paraphrasing "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" where Johnny Depp says: "We can't stop here, this is bat country!" while wasted on drugs, though not as wasted as later in the movie.

The title text includes different kinds of quotes, including the ASCII " and ', and Unicode “” (which have both an opening and closing version). Phones and laptops often have different input systems, and one of them may use a different kind of quote, thus mixing inconsistent quotes together, something most people may not notice or understand.

Transcript

This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks.

Bracket Symbols

and what they mean

( ) Regular parentheses for setting stuff aside

[ ] Square brackets (more secure)

{ } This stuff is expensive so be careful with it

" " Someone is talking

' ' Someone British is talking

‹ › An Animorph is talking

« » A French Animorph is talking

| | I'm scared of negative numbers but these sigils will protect me

* * _ _ / / I have a favorite monospaced font

~ ~ I'm being sarcastic and I had a Tumblr account in 2014

[ ( [ { ( ) } ] , ) ] These Python functions are not getting along

⌊ ⌋ Help, I'm a mathematician trying to work with actual numbers and they're scary

ʃ ʅ Why are you trying to read my violin?

| ⟩ Don't stop here--this is quantum country

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Discussion

ummm. How does editing this stuff work. Is this HTML? Why can't we have a gooey? Also, I only sort of get this comic, but it's not that funny. <marquee behavior="scroll" direction="up">Here is some scrolling text... going up!</marquee> 172.69.58.102 05:13, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Have a WHAT? - 172.70.179.88 09:26, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

A Gooey. Although I'm not sure how that would help.172.70.163.121 11:27, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm sure that should be GUI (Graphical User Interface. --141.101.69.76 11:40, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

The "violin" symbols look like an upside-down bag symbol (multiset symbol) to me, moreso than integrals. 172.69.58.135 18:09, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Did my best with my first ever contribution - I know there's a chart feature but I cba to relearn html. Feel free to fix it and PLEASE finish my bad explanations. Qwikster (talk) 06:05, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

⌊⌋ are floor brackets (and you can now copy-paste them from here into the explanation as needed) 162.158.126.33 06:03, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

As for the spaghetti, in Python, it'd be a list containing a tuple containing a list containing a set containing an empty tuple. Probably doesn't mean anything specific and pretty much useless), but it *is* legal code 162.158.126.164 06:05, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Yay, I figured out how to use a table! Qwikster (talk) 06:42, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm British, ex 60+ years and I'm sure I was taught in school to use "for first person speech" and 'for quoting others'. I hadn't even noticed printers doing the opposite. But there again I didn't go to Grammar School. RIIW - Ponder it (talk) 07:36, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

[Update] Researching this issue, using " or ' is acceptable in the UK as long as you are consistent in any work. However, most British authored books I have use '. Then, thought I, Douglas Adams did his own type setting, what did he use? In my box set of HHG2G it's '. But then I found a first (paperback) print run of Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency... And he used ". I don't think he would have been fickle, so that tells me the ' in British books is a printers' foible. (Controversially, they were responsible for a lot of extra u's being added to 'Latinise' spelling, even in words with Greek or Germanic roots and the replacement of Fall with Autumn) YMMV.RIIW - Ponder it (talk) 10:42, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

I remember thinking it was to 'save ink'. After all in a 300 page novel with a lot of "speech", imagine how much savings you might have with 'speech', instead... ;)

But I'll accept "printer's foible" (or 'prïnter"s foïble'!) as an answer, given that we were still taught to write with doubles (and using fountain pens). Pity they couldn't have also refused to print Oxford Commas, though, which are complete waste of space (and, in their case, ink!)... 172.69.195.64 12:30, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

I'm British, too, and as I recall my school says sixty years ago, the symbols () are just called brackets and parenthesis is just the grammatical construct in which they can be used. But you can use dashes or even commas to indicate a parenthesis. This has been discussed on such blogs has Ben Yagoda's Not One-off Britishisms. https://notoneoffbritishisms.com/2015/12/15/square-brackets/ --172.70.90.178 08:16, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Yeah - I don't know where this weird idea that British people use single quotes comes from - it's not my experience. Generally seems to be double quotes for direct speech, and single quotes for paraphrasing, scare quotes, 'jargonisms', etc. I've added to the explanation to reflect that a bit.172.69.195.176 11:33, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Similar vintage of Brit, here. Always taught to write "66s and 99s" on any primary quotation (you'd '6 and 9' quotes-within-quotes and 66/99 quotes-within-quotes-within-quotes). Except books often seemed to be single(-double(-single))-nesting, always assumed that was the US standard, as they tended to have the likes of "color" and "sulfur", too.

In typing (typewriter, word processor and on into the internet age) I'd use ""s as my primary, unless it 'wasn't really speech'... essentially scare-quotes, or emphasis. Though in the text-only information age (usenet, etc), I'd use some of the others for /Italics/, *Bold* and _Underline_ purposes.

For coding purposes, I'd have to use whatever the programming language required (I added the note about Pascal's character/string differentation), except in Perl, where I go for a 'sensible' mix of aesthetics/readability and practicality as I make wide use of the full range of options available to me, in quotation context, whatever doesn't clash badly with any use of q[array], qq{sub or hash}, qx|binary OR|, =~s/whatever is in my/regexp/, etc... 172.69.194.36 12:54, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

The integral sign (and its reverse) in the context of string instruments are the so-called 'F-holes', and they're not just decorative elements but help in the instrument(s) resonate more freely. Other shapes exist as well. See here for an in-depth explanation. 172.69.151.27 09:13, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

「かっこ」108.162.250.151 09:24, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Randall missed an opportunity to reference catamorphisms i.e. banana brackets. There may be some better examples missed as well.

Who is that? 172.68.186.156 10:05, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

Likely reference to the quote and catchphrase "We can't stop here, this is bat country" from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? 162.158.134.242 11:05, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

The 'violin' quotes may look similar (but not identical) to the S-Shaped bag delimiters (U+27C5 & U+27C6), though these are normally used in the opposite order to enclose multisets. 172.71.90.10 13:52, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

The French quotation marks « » are better known as guillemets. They are also used in Spanish, and probably several other written languages. 172.71.142.167 15:10, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

The single-/double-quotes being recursively embedded with the other reminds me of a short story I once read. It had the form of a tale a person was telling of when he encountered a stranger with a tale of his own. In that tale, the stranger made the aquaintance of a particularly talkative individual. That individual reported the story he heard from a further interlocutor, that story featuring the reminiscences of someone else... Which came to a conclusion." ...is the way it ended.' ...and so went that story" ...but of course that was just what was heard.' ...if, of course, you could credit it." (It was more layers deep, of course, and with both starting quotes and the paragraph-maintaining standards of opening quotes, which yet still managed to suck you in.) Cannot remember who it was by/what it was called, but obviously the play on the style (a bit more clever than just "I met a man who said, 'I met a man who said, "I met a man who said, 'I met a man who said "..."'"'") made a big impression on me at the time. 172.70.162.18 19:51, 4 July 2024 (UTC)

"~~ I'm being sarcastic and..." The symbol ≈ means approximately equal to. This is much used in some engineering writing. "Output level should be ≈1 Volt." In casual work this may be approximated as "~", or "~~" which is less liable to be confused for a negative sign. -- PRR (talk) 04:02(+:03), 5 July 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

It can also be used for such as "~240V", AC power supply, and I use tildes an awful lot in Perl for both regexp operations and bitwise negation (though I also like it as a nicely distinctive choice of delimiter character for joined/split data transportation, at times) . As to the comic text, I sort of associate it with the 'decorated' usernames (akin to Dwarf Fortress 'item quality modifiers', but of course not inspired by such, not sure if they inspired it) along the lines of .~·«wIeRdLyReNdErEdNaMe»·~. 172.70.91.158 10:21, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

As the only person to get an Academy Technical Achievement Award for inventing screenplay text formatting (and a produced screenwriter in the WGAw), I’m here to let you know square brackets are NOT used in screenplays, teleplays, or stage plays to denote stage direction. Square brackets aren’t used for ANYTHING in those script forms. This should be corrected (by someone more conversant with edits) to indicate that normal parenthesis are used in screenplay or teleplays to indicate stage direction associated with specific passages of dialog. These are typically called “parenthetical action” or “parenthetical.” Some stage play formats omit parenthetical action but place parentheses around passages of stage action. But NEVER square brackets. -- SMGxkcd (talk) 13:11, 5 July 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Per this unsigned comment, I've made the requested move from square brackets to parentheses. I don't know if this is correct or not, so maybe additional discussion could confirm or refute this claim. Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 13:34, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

Should we start up an Animorphs category now? It's been referenced a few times now, 1380, 1817, and also in 1187 and 1360. Fephisto (talk) 14:00, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

has existed since 2014, and this comic is (as of now) tagged with it: Category:Animorphs --172.70.114.29 14:16, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

('_')b Fephisto (talk) 14:18, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

Double quotes: "Someone is talking". Single quotes: double quotes, but this someone is talking... with "missing teeth"...? Making fun of British dental hygiene is still common? Or died that out with Brexit? 172.71.99.139 20:10, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

It's basically untrue, of course. The difference might be that in Britain 'cosmetic' dentistry isn't as prioritised as actually keeping them healthy.

It doesn't go into it there, but the thing about a third of people "not having any natural teeth" in thr 1970s might actually have been a side-effect of prior eras dental care, where the opportunity to have all your teeth taken out to avoid problems in the future. Often arranged as a wedding present to newlyweds. So you had generations of adults (young to old) now using dentures (which either look better than 'natural' teeth or aren't made well enough). With the rise of the NHS (which initially got overwhelmed with people getting their traditional whole-mouth-removals 'free'), things changed so that it wasn't a luxury to get dental care, though it did become far less 'free at the point of need' than most other elements of healthcare (both as reaction against the initial overwhelming of the post-war services and from 'tweaking' (often by the usual political suspects) by one government or another).

Right now, there are minor crises in 'dentist deserts' (the availability of NHS dentists being sparse for some regions, for various reasons), but if you are happily registered with a practice then you're probably as Ok as your own personal approach to dental hygiene allows you to be. And if you can (and want to) pay, then fill your boots with 'Turkey Teeth', whitening, straightening, etc, to make the "actually pretty ok" mouth whatever you think is 'perfection'. (Which often ends up giving you more of a 'plastic fake dentures' look than anything else.)

I mean, not funny, but possibly educational. 172.70.91.96 22:52, 5 July 2024 (UTC)

Bad encoding. My firefox shows the title text as ’"‘”’ (on the original website, not here). 172.71.210.81 11:16, 7 July 2024 (UTC)

The explanation for the last item should probably reference the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, as that is the source of the quote in the film. 172.70.85.153 17:48, 20 July 2024 (UTC)