From: "Michael Everson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > At 10:36 +0100 2004-03-19, Marco Cimarosti wrote: > >Michael Everson wrote: > >> What "organization" uses the ANARCHY SYMBOL? ;-) > > > >The anarchist movement. Why are you winking? > > That's not "an organization". As Rick said, it's a disorganization. ;-)
And even today, anarchists would not like any formal proposition to standardize a glyph variant as the definitive standard for its representation. Each Anarchist group will have its prefered presentation and thus will use its own distinctive glyph variant, should it be a dedicated font, or a graphic design. This has nothing to do with the need to encode it in plain text. For that latest usage, the circled Latin letter A is good enough, and it can be rendered at will with any font or graphic associated with that symbol, when the author needs a specific design and thus cannot count only on the plain-text encoding but needs some rich-text format to convey this specific graphic design. In fact, an Anarchist font could be designed as well to match the desired style for anyone of the existing Unicode characters, not just the circled A. Such font would mimic the appearance of what you could paint manually with a pencil on a rough surface such as a tag on a wall. If you look on the walls of various large cities around the world, you will immediately see that these graphic patterns are very specific to each group (or gang sometimes) which use them as a way to mark their "territory" or area or influence, with very distinctful graphic design, colors, dimensions and associated symbolism. The importance is not in the message itself (when it is present) but really in the graphic and artistic design which serves as an identity. So an Anarchist symbol, if used, will just be a small part of a more general set of symbols that spans larger concepts than just a single character. Also the same anarchist group will use various sorts of "media" to reproduce this symbol, and with lots of variations depending on the surface where it is drawn or painted. Let's keep the circled Latin A as one possible way to represent this symbol in plain-text, but I don't think that plain-text is the best media to convey all the symbolism and graphic patterns needed by anarchist. Suppose that one symbol is encoded as such, anarchists will also refuse to adaopt it as a standard (some may choose to create a simpler mapping to the ASCII capital letter A as well, throughout the text where an uppercase A is present in words). Don't even ask them to use the newly encoded character, they will refuse that rule and argue that their anarchist point of view allows them to do what they want for the texts they produce themselves. Anarchists are definitely not attached to any symbol, even their own; some prefer a lightning symbol with an arrow, some use an A within a triangle, or change the A for another letter from another script, simply because a Latin A may look as a link to the occidental culture foreign to the area where the anarchist group wants to demonstrate its presence. I have seen for example an Hebrew alef rendered similarly within a geometric shape (I think it was a 5-pointed star, as a way to clearly detach the easily recognizable symbol from the 6-pointed David's star which is linked to another religious and cultural symbolism, but I'm not sure it was used as a symbol for an anarchist israelian movement). Probably there are other symbols used by anarchist groups in Japan and Korea, using some Asian related symbolism and a letter from a Asian script. Anarchist groups in South America may choose other cultural symbols such as glyphs from extinct scripts. In fact there seems to exist as many symbols used as groups revendicating an anarchist cultural background.
