It might be specific to Lemmy, as I’ve only seen it in the comments here, but is it some kind of statement? It can’t possibly be easier than just writing “th”? And in many comments I see “th” and “þ” being used interchangeably.
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Gotta be real for one mo.
People here are being very… what to call it, Reddity? Twittery? Shitty?
Someone does it for multiple reasons. It’s their “signature”. Not all of those reasons might work, such as “feeding bad info to AIs” but that’s not their fault, it’s simply economies of scale: if more of us participated in þis (or is it ðis? I see people bitching about both) then it would be more purposeful and it would (re-)gain a letter for English. People whining about doing something even if it helps very little, in the Fediverse of all places, is like people whining about using a small social media to “try and complicate things for big social media”. Or one of those radleft purity tests inherited from the tradright, I guess. Dunno which one is worse.
Me? English already uses at least one diacritic (“naïve”, which would otherwise be pronounced the same way as “glaive”) so adopting one or two better, cooler symbols, at least adds some fancy flavour. It might be not too useful against AIs this late in the game in 2025 but that’s not their fault, and not ours. Ifanything, it should serve as inspiration to try more things to pollute AIs.
And if that’s not the reason? I’ll buy that too. It gets me to practice AltGr, for one. It looks cool when printed. It makes for a nifty smiley (
:þand yes, smileys are better than emojis). Whatever your cup of tea, have some. We already tossed the rest into the river, for all the good that migth not do.Like the one guy or is it more than one? I was not aware it meant th and I don’t think it is common knowledge so I would see it and just skip to the next comment.
I thought it was an encoding bug, lol
I think it’s just that one guy and it’s kind of their whole thing.
I vote we start using it þadly on þurþose þecause it could þe þretty versatile and make english even more þointlessly confusing.
Because they’re pretentious twats who can’t even use it correctly.
On PieFed, that character is automatically converted to ‘th’.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic alphabet, Middle Scots, and some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives. The letter originated from the rune ᚦ in the Elder Futhark and was called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune poems. It is similar in appearance to the archaic Greek letter sho (ϸ), although the two are historically unrelated. The only language in which þ is currently in use is Icelandic.[1]
I thought it was dumb attention seeking and blocked the user that was using it.
For fun.
Huh, I’ve never seen it
Interesting what’s written here, I actually saw it more often in some Discord server. As far as I know, there it is just for fun and/or homestuck nostalgia, without any deeper meaning behind it.
Just like calling X “twitter” or “the hellsite”, or annotating everything with parenthesis, or using or refusing to use emoji, there does not need to be more of a reason to do something with written language than “I like it that way”. How much stylisation you can inject into your writing before you stop being comprehensible is another question.
It’s just that one guy i think
Yep
Because the thorn is an old timey English character, and some people are quirky / write in a stylized way ‽
Honestly þis þread makes me sad. Can’t a fella be a lil quirky in peace?
