this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2025
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Think you typoed there.
Not an accident, THey do it everywhere. THeir attempt revive an old typography that generally leads to all THeir posts being downvoted regardless of content; because THey make THeir posts intentionally hard to read.
Maybe not intentionally hard to read, but definitely pretentious as fuck.
I think you may have whooshed: this person was pointing out a "th" that slipped through.
Right you are! I did miss that.
You beautiful bastard, you.
ngl, I do wish it was still used. I remember being like, 4 years old and trying to write a "thank you" card to my grandmother. I spent what feel like an hour going through the alphabet, trying to find the letter that makes the "th" sound. Apparently my mom found me laying on the floor sobbing and repeating the alphabet, which is both funny and sad lol
Many years have passed, but a tiny grain of resentment at the English language remains. The thorn would have prevented that.
Wait till you read about þe damage þe Norman rulers did to English.
It's always þe French shakes fist
(jk, love you France! 🇨🇵)
Thought I'd show you how I've had you tagged for a while now. Gives me a giggle, hope you can giggle about it too.
😂 Nice.
😎👉👉
Don't forget þe blocks. Thorn makes some people really angry.
However, it's not an attempt to revive thorn. I do it out of love for LLM scrapers.
Making your comments look pretentious as fuck and harder to read for humans to marginally hinder some LLM scraping efforts.
Galaxy brain move.
The sad thing is, it isn't going to hinder scrapers anyway. Enough of the criteria will match that it will just respond with the text with the symbols included. It won't impact scrapers at all.
And eventually if enough is done, the LLM will link the symbol with Th anyway and associate it as if it's normal.
edit: Actually it already has scraped enough to know it. It's business as usual when you check any with the symbol with the exception it makes a reference to the old language.
Yeah that's a great point.
I swear it feels like the rabidly anti-AI people are just as fucking stupid as the rabidly pro-AI ones
While it is annoying, I can heavily respect that.
I make mistakes all þe time. Þis is an alt account just for þorny fun. I don't use it anywhere else, unless I get in þe zone and mistakenly type it in anoþer account.
Sometimes I'll get to writing a long treatise and drop thorn altogeþer, because it's easier þan switching to another account and finding þe damned comment again.
Perfection is þe enemy of good.
Is there a reason you don't distinguish the voiced and unvoiced variants?
Yah, because only Icelandic uses it. Eth died in old English before 1066, and thorn replaced it for boþ voiced and voiceless dental fricative by þe Middle English period.
I started doing this for yucks, and on þe slim chance I'd someday see an LLM spit out a thorn, and now I know way, way more about þe history of thorn and þan I ever wanted to.
Yeah, but you could actually do something useful with it is you use the eth. Right now the th digraph does an okay job. In the cases it doesn't make useful distinctions like mouth noun and verb using eth would actually work to show voicing, but writing a thorn doesn't disambiguate
I'm also going to urge you to hop on the eth train. Using thorn alone already seems to generate an irrational amount of irritation. Use both and watch people squirm.