alt Hacker NewsI’m not a typographic nut (though I care about it more than the average American), but one of the worst trends I’ve seen is to use the square root character (√) as a checkmark (). I’ve even seen Apple do it. It doesn’t help that the checkmark glyph is generally terrible, and at least on a Mac, the shortcut (⌥+V) exists for square root, and happens to be something a Windows user might accidentally find when transitioning to Mac key bindings while the checkmark requires either knowing true code point and how to enter that in or going to the Emoji & Symbols panel.
For 99.9% of people, as long as the meaning is clear, they’ll never even register that the wrong code point, wrong symbol, or even wrong formatting was used. While I prefer correctness when possible, I’ve come to terms that others only care about communicating their intent.
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I’ll own up to being someone who does this when I’m on a Mac. The reason is simple: they don’t give you a way to type a “real” check. And though Emoji contain suitable ones, those aren’t always appropriate (or allowed, such as here).
On a Mac, the facility you’re given to pick emoji (which is also the same palette you’d need to pick a fancy checkmark Unicode) is horrifyingly bad - it’s slow and hard to use, and has been getting worse.
Of course, iOS, whose emoji picker is pretty nice by comparison, completely lacks a first-party character palette and doesn’t support the “option key” method, so on iOS, it’s emoji or nothing.
> to use the square root character (√) as a checkmark ([filtered out])
IMHO that's an old-school-ism: I've never seen that in the post-Unicode world, but I recall its being common in the days of PC-compatibles, when square root was one of the ~256 characters you got, and checkmark wasn't, so you made do. In the same bucket with "using eszett (ß) as a lowercase beta (β)" or "using upper-half-of-integral (⌠) as a long S (ſ)." In fact Wikipedia's footnotes mention all three of these substitutions. (Or "using hyphen-minus (-) as a minus sign (−)." ;))
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437
[2] - https://knowware.dk/dos56/norton-commander-1.shtml — see the last two screenshots on this page, from Norton Commander