This is an angzarr, otherwise known as Right Angle With Downwards Zigzag Arrow.
That nickname is actually a clever reference to how it’s a right angle with a downwards
zigzag arrow.
But here’s a question: what does this symbol mean?
A bad day on the stock market?
Lightning hitting somebody’s elbow?
A snake slithering off of a chair because you just asked it a really offensive question
about snakes and ruined your whole dinner with this snake?
Well, your guess is as good as mine because it turns out… nobody knows.
Okay, okay, I know that doesn’t sound exciting; there are lots of symbols or combinations
of symbols that don’t seem to have any discernible meaning.
But the angzarr is a little different—it’s officially part of unicode.
This weird little guy has been programmed into nearly every single computer on Earth
for decades, having been updated and carried over countless different times.
But if no one seems to know what it means, then that raises a kind of strange question:
why is this symbol in your computer, and who put it there?
Well, before I talk about how this character probably ended up in unicode, I need to explain
how unicode works in the first place.
Let’s say you’ve just opened a text file on your computer—and for the sake of simplicity,
let’s say it’s the Half as Interesting script I need to finish by the end of today,
which currently just contains the letter “L.” You see, that file doesn’t actually contain
the L itself—the arrangement of pixels you see when you look at an L on your screen—that
would make text files way bigger than they had to be.
Instead, this text file contains a very short code that tells your computer to display the
L that’s sitting somewhere in its hard drive.
Now, that seems simple enough, but this system used to have some pretty major problems; up
until the 1990s, computers made by different companies, running different operating systems,
or displaying different languages had a lot of trouble reading each others’ files.
If the codes in one computer’s database corresponded to different characters, then
the text typed on one computer would show up as something completely different on the
other.
If you sent an email to your wife in Norway that said “I love you, my Norwegian wife,”
she might open it and see a file that says “I am wanted for manslaughter.
Also I do not love you anymore and I want a divorce.
Do not contact me or ask me any further questions about this email.”
Could that have actually happened?
No, not really, but it gets the basic idea across and that’s what’s important.
This problem was eventually solved with the invention of Unicode: a totally universal
character encoding system that encompassed pretty much every single writing system known
to man—both old and new—with every extra symbol and bit of punctuation that might conceivably
need to be used on a computer.
This collection of 144,697 different characters is shared by every modern computer, and that
collection includes this thing: the angzarr.
So, okay: yadda yadda yadda, boring nerd talk, every computer on Earth shares a common collection
of symbols so that no one accidentally divorces their Norwegian wife.
But how, exactly, did the angzarr end up in this collection if no one knows what it means?
Like, this is literally the most comprehensive and strictly maintained writing system in
human history.
It has its own consortium with members from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and IBM
whose whole purpose is just to vote on stuff like whether…
Upper Right Block Diagonal Lower Middle Left To Lower Right should be a real character.
Apparently it is, and it has a whole reason to exist.
So how did this thing slip through the cracks?
Well, like most stupid questions, there was exactly one man on the internet who was wondering
the same thing and did a crazy amount of research to figure out the answer.
Good unpaid labor, Jonathan!
Now, according to this guy’s research, the angzarr was first proposed, along with a whole
bunch of other characters, in this document.
This whole thing was the work of an organization called the STIX Project, which was formed
to regulate mathematical symbols… but the woman who actually documented the angzarr
for them weighed in to say that even she had no idea what it meant when she put it in their
registry.
She got the symbol from a technical report put out by the International Standards Organization,
which I can’t actually show you because I’m not about to waste 198 of my precious
Swiss Francs on two seconds of this video.
It’s not entirely clear where the ISO originally sourced the symbol, but they seemingly pulled
a lot of their characters from the now-totally-defunct Association for Font Information Interchange,
who seemingly just let anyone register a symbol for five bucks.
So…
there’s pretty much no way of knowing why this symbol exists, unless you’re the one
cryptic dork who paid five bucks in the early 1990s to register “Right Angle With Downwards
Zigzag Arrow” with the AFII.
If that happens to be you… please don’t comment below with the answer because that
would ruin this whole video.
Of course, there are some pretty good theories as to what the angzarr might actually mean.
Or at least, kind of mean.
Electricians have pointed out, for example, that the downwards zigzag arrow is used in
other electrical symbols to indicate a short circuit.
Some mathematicians have noted that in their field, the downwards zigzag arrow means that
there’s a logical contradiction of some kind, and other mathematicians have speculated
that it might refer to a graph whose Y axis continues below its X axis.
Certain annoying people with no particular expertise at all have observed that the angzarr
looks a whole lot like this ancient chaos magic sigil, even though this ancient chaos
magic sigil was invented in 2004 and didn’t even exist when the angzarr was added to unicode.
But really, the beauty of this symbol is that it has no meaning—it’s an empty vessel
for us to create our own meanings.
You can use it for anything.
It could be an enticing pickup line on a dating app, or a cryptic way of telling your landlord
that you aren’t gonna pay rent that month.
Maybe, you could even use it as a way of saying, “Hey, Sam, good video, I enjoyed watching
that video, and I’m even going to sit through the whole ad at the end just to be nice.”
In exchange for your kindness, I’m going to let you in on a little secret: learning
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