this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2025
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There are two camps who are using the old letters. Those who think the letters and fun and different and maybe we lost something when we stopped using them.
And then there are those who might be using them as a dog whistle of sorts. The darker side of the "we lost something" sentiment. Y'know; "Make English great again" but with exclusionism and jackboots. (See also: Anglish, which has the same problem.)
I'd quite like to be one of the wacky bunch who uses those letters occasionally because they're neat, but I don't want to be mistaken for the other sort of person.
There's also a problem with old letters anyway. "The" was spelt with "þ", not "ð" despite the latter having the correct sound, and so you'll see people altering the spelling of "þe" to be "ðe". This iz equivalent to spelling sertain other wordz with the wrong letterz. This annoys purists of all stripes, jackboots or otherwise. (Heck, I'm not even sure which is the right one for "other". "th" covers all bases.)
I mean, it's almost worth it to annoy the fascists, but it's probably best just to leave the old letters in the past.
annoy the fascists? Huh
I admit it's a bit of a straw man. I'm imagining that 1) there exist fascistic purists of the English language (some of the Anglish bunch are definitely like this), 2) they not only like the old letters but they're using them as a dog whistle, and 3) they might be be annoyed by people getting their "pure" spellings wrong.
Nonetheless, I prefer to avoid potential dog whistles if I can help it.
(Semi-relatedly, I also think the runic alphabet is cool, but wouldn't you know it, at least one of those symbols is used by white supremacists. We can't have anything nice.)