This is not dramatic. French keyboards have a standard degree symbol on them, Spanish keyboards have the masculine ordinal. This character is often confused, just like notations of degrees/minutes/seconds using ASCII quotation marks instead of prime symbols.
In an email not intended to be typographically rendered and not speaking about this character, let's be tolerant. We've all understood, there's no confusion given the context. 2012/8/14 Michael Everson <ever...@evertype.com>: > On 14 Aug 2012, at 21:52, Khaled Hosny wrote: > >> On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 03:56:23PM -0400, Robert Wheelock wrote: >>> ... 90º ... 45º >> >> BTW, the degree sign is ° not the masculine ordinal indicator that you are >> using. > > :-) > > Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/ > > >