Hijacked symbols

Printers had a habit of making do. If they lacked a given character in their font, or ran out of a given symbol before setting up a page, they would commonly press another, similar, symbol into use in its place.

We have not been entirely consistent in how we treat these. In many cases, we may not even have noticed that it was going on. At one extreme, such substitutions may be indistinguishable from typographic errors. "f" and long "s" are sometimes used almost interchangeably. When a printer ran short of "I," it is clear that in some books he would substitute "J"--even for the first person pronoun. In one book the common "ct" ligature is substituted (accidentally or not) for the ampersand character. In all of these cases, the 'erroneous' reading is what is captured, and a 'letter' is therefore implicitly defined on formal grounds.

In other cases, we have preferred a more semantic definition of 'letter' or 'character.' This is certainly true in the cases of various ambiguous characters. A character that resembles "z", for example, may be captured as "z", "&yogh;", "-m", <ABBR></ABBR>, etc. Formally identical upright triangles may be captured as &fire; &trine; or &utri;, depending on context. Hence we will sometimes capture 'incorrect' (substituted) symbols as if they were simply allographs of the expected character. This is easier to do when there is at least some formal congruence between them.

See also Ambiguous abbreviations, case 5.

OTHER EXAMPLES WANTED!

Example Expected character Actual character (when it is at home) Capture as

&rx;
&Jupit;		 &Rx; Of The Cordial Flowers

&rx;
&Jupit;		 &rx; Of The Leaves

&ounce;		 ?? ??&ounce; j ss.

&ounce;		 ?? ??&ounce; ss.

Note: the last two examples are uncertain in every respect. I am not certain that the intended meaning is 'ounce'; and not certain that the symbol has a native meaning other than 'ounce'. The peculiar form of "ss" in the last example should also be noted. I have assumed that this is simply a variant form of "ss", though perhaps it too has a different native meaning, or at least should be treated as containing an abbreviation stroke (i.e. <ABBR>ss</ABBR>).