dive into mark

Kuro5hin: Misleading emoticons. But the real fun starts in the comments, where I am reminded of the oldie-but-goodie, the waka waka bang splat punctuation poem.

Those who are too young to have already misspent their youth on the Internet may be unaware of the waka waka poem. A quick Google search for waka waka bang splat is informative. The poem has been around forever. Even longer than Britney Spears.

First, the poem itself (there are many versions, this is just one):

<> ! * ' ' #
^ " ` $ $ -
! * = @ $ _
% * <> ~ # 4
& [ ] . . /
| { , , system halted

In English, this reads:

waka waka bang splat tick tick hash
caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash
bang splat equal at dollar under-score
percent splat waka waka tilda number four
ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash
vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma crash

(Side note: must test this with the JAWS screen reader and see how it reads it.)

Naturally, some sod put it to music. It’s made to be sung as a round, so get together with your newly-converted Mac OS X friends and sing it around the bonfire you made out of your Windows XP licenses and ASP books. Roast marshmellows. Enjoy yourself.

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