Your Shrug Has Some Very Official Character Names
You've typed ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ approximately ten thousand times. It's the universal response to bad traffic, unclear instructions, and Mondays. But have you ever stopped to wonder what those characters are actually called?
Mark Liberman ran the shrug through a tool called charnames.pl and got the official Unicode names back. They are wonderful.
The Full Roster
Here's what the Unicode Consortium actually calls each piece of your shrug:
- ¯ is COMBINING MACRON (U+0304)
- \ is REVERSE SOLIDUS (U+005C)
- _ is LOW LINE (U+005F)
- ( is LEFT PARENTHESIS (U+0028)
- ツ is KATAKANA LETTER TU (U+30C4)
- ) is RIGHT PARENTHESIS (U+0029)
- / is SOLIDUS (U+002F)
Read that list twice. "REVERSE SOLIDUS." That's the backslash. You've been hitting REVERSE SOLIDUS your entire life without knowing it.
SOLIDUS and REVERSE SOLIDUS
The forward slash is SOLIDUS (U+002F). Clean. Direct.
The backslash is REVERSE SOLIDUS (U+005C). Not "backslash." Not "the other slash." REVERSE SOLIDUS. It sounds like a legal filing. Like a chess gambit. Like something that should come with a signature and a notary stamp.
The shrug uses both. SOLIDUS on the right arm, REVERSE SOLIDUS on the left. Perfectly balanced. Almost poetic for a character that means "whatever."
KATAKANA LETTER TU
The face is ツ, officially KATAKANA LETTER TU (U+30C4). It's a katakana character. It got recruited into shrug duty because it looks exactly like two eyes and a grin.
Unicode encoded U+30C4 for one job. The internet gave it a second career entirely. No one asked. No committee approved it. It just happened, and now it is the face of collective human indifference.
LOW LINE: The Unsung Shoulders
The underscores flanking ツ are LOW LINEs (U+005F). Not underscores. LOW LINEs.
These are the shrug's shoulders. They do all the physical work of the gesture. Without LOW LINE, you just have arms floating in space next to a face. LOW LINE gives the shrug its posture, its human shape, its whole vibe.
LOW LINE deserves more respect.
You've Been Citing Unicode This Whole Time
Every character has an official name. A formal, all-caps Unicode name, assigned by committee, documented in a standard, completely unknown to almost everyone who uses it daily.
Your keyboard is full of COMBINING MACRONs and REVERSE SOLIDUSes and things that sound like they belong in ancient legal documents.
The shrug just happens to be the combination that exposes all of them at once.
Next time someone asks an unanswerable question, you're not just shrugging. You're deploying COMBINING MACRON, REVERSE SOLIDUS, LOW LINE, LEFT PARENTHESIS, KATAKANA LETTER TU, RIGHT PARENTHESIS, and SOLIDUS in precise sequence.
That's not a shrug. That's a citation.
Source: Languagelog