# A Little Dotty? M*MILLION artifact of character set

*The Urth list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 22 Dec 1999*

<https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/2052>

> Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright
> in each message remains with the person who wrote it.
> Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original
> archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than
> retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.

---

### Talarican
*22 Dec 1999, 21:15*

Dan,
"
Hmmm, I always assumed the plate read: M . Million

Sometimes a dot is used to indicate multiplication.  "Monsieur" is
often abbreviated to "M."
"

You're right, of course. I would actually have preferred to use a "bullet"
dot floating at mid-line height for this, but of course the email character
set wouldn't support it, so far as I know. But that's how _I_ envisioned
what Number Five saw, with his hungover revelation proceeding when he
realizes that the dot is not a period but a dot at half-height in the line
of text.
I tried to approximate it with an asterisk, which of course is also used as
a multiplication sign, esp. in most programming languages.
BTW I apologize to all for my mishap last couple of posts; I didn't realize
my new email software defaulted to HTML.

---