Talk:((( )))

did the anti-Semitic use end the hugging?

i remember using this in chat rooms in the 1990s and i never really got into texting but it looks like that's where people went after Internet Relay Chat started to lose popularity and Discord hadnt yet been created. I remember that it wasnt specifically just 3 parens, either. The source even calls it multiple parens rahter than specifying three. Also the early anti-Semitic use may have been variable as well.

Anyway, this is just about the hardest possible thing to search for so Im not going to bother, nor will i expect others to ... im just wondering, did the 2014 coinage of the anti-Semitic use destroy the original usage of showing compassion, or had the original use already fallen out of fashion before 2014? Im not sure Ive even seen it in this century. —Soap— 15:49, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure if I've ever seen the use to surround someone's name that our entry describes, (((Cayce))). But even in just the last month, two English-speaking friends messaged me ((Hug)) or (Hug), with one or two parentheses surrounding the word "hug", so that—at least—lives on even now. SymbolHound used to exist as a search engine that could search for special characters, but it seems to have died. - -sche (discuss) 16:10, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. It's definitely real, although it's occurred to me that the parentheses have never been particularly easy keys to type on mobile phones, neither in the present touchscreen era nor in the early days of SMS, so I wonder if, despite this entry having a (texting) label, it's actually mobile phones that drove it into obsolescence in favor of easier-to-type synonyms such as *hug*, (h), and eventually emojis. Yet, social media was so much smaller then, and cellphones such a novelty, that I imagine some people were typing out the parens one by one just to show they really meant it. In any case, unless people remember using parentheses for hugs in the smartphone era, I think the 2014 use may have been only a minor factor in its obsolescence, as it is simply difficult to type on a phone. —Soap— 05:16, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

@Soap Maybe add some non-English cites to prove it is actually used outside English? Also the lang codes of the citations are now wrong. Jberkel 12:01, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Translingual terms can have citations in any language, right? For a thing that wraps around words, it has to belong to one language or another, not to translingual. So I left the en codes in the citations on purpose. If that's going to cause some sort of template error, I suppose we'll have to do what we need to to make it work.

As for citing this in other languages, for the same reason as above, I can't ... there's just no feasible way to search for parentheses in any search engine. SymbolHound was probably turning up very little revenue and using more processing power than it could afford. It's the same reason case-sensitive search engines failed so early on. I admire the effort that it took to turn up our existing English cites, and I certainly can't repeat that. Anyway ..... I suppose we could move it back to English on the basis that only English is cited, but I think it's still better as a Translingual term even without non-English cites because it isn't actually a word, it's a symbol. Oh well. I won't fight over this, but I still think I have the right idea. Thanks, —Soap— 12:20, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

Yes, but translingual English quotes should have {{quote-*|en|termlang=mul}}, otherwise the autocategorization will be wrong. Regarding attestation, it looks like the origin is anglophone, but there's a chance someone copied it, or just translated the English text into another language. It's just so highly niche as a symbol that I doubt it would easily spread across languages. But maybe I'm wrong. Jberkel 12:35, 28 August 2023 (UTC)