I received the following sentence from someone which read:
"Is there a reason I /wouldn't/ want to go?"
What is / / used for in this context? My guess is a textual representation of upward intonation for emphasis but I cannot find anything on it.
Note: I've seen many articles that say "it's for a programming comment." I'm a programmer and am aware of that but it doesn't seem to be used as a comment in this case.
In the sentence quoted, I would interpret the marks as an indication that the enclosed word would be printed in an alternative typeface—italic or bold—if the layout conformed to conventional orthography, where the sentence would be laid out
"Is there some reason I wouldn't want to go?".
In other contexts, for example, a program listing, they might be indicative of a comment, although this might vary by the language, as different languages might use different punctuation protocols to denote a comment.
This is a common convention in text-only communication, such as Usenet, email or IRC. Without typography, some indications of emphasis are commonly used:
_underline_/italic/*bold*-deleted- (rare)(Sorry, no authoritative reference - just personal experience).
The use of // to indicate italics goes back earlier, to typewritten documents; the other forms could be created by overtyping.
Some of these conventions have influenced the Markdown used here on Stack Exchange.
_ for italic. I stand by my claim that underscores represent underline, thought that in turn represents italic. Another popular convention is to underline headings with a row of =, although that probably needs no explanation.
Commented
May 3, 2017 at 9:08
one long thing and three separate things, but is less visually disruptive than the other choices.
That can be a letter from an old person. Many old typewriter machines had no parenthesis characters, specially in foreign languages, where they use more letters than in the English alphabet, so the standard had to be modified. So people who learned typing on those machines used the / character in place of parenthesis. Then it can mean many things still, like an alternate thought, an internal note, or anything a parenthesis can be used for.
/, and yes, you are right, even young people do it. I was always interested why?
/ :) so many misunderstanding with people...
This is almost certainly Org mode syntax for italics. As the guide states:
You can make words
*bold*,/italic/,_underlined_,=code=and~verbatim~, and, if you must,‘+strike-through+’.
People tend to use the markup language they are familiar with. Presumably the user who posted the comment uses Org mode and the Emacs text editor regularly.
For an incomplete comparison of various lightweight markup language syntax, see this table on Wikipedia. You'll notice that a few languages use slashes to represent italics, although most that do use //double slashes//. Org mode seems to be the only one that uses /single slashes/.
Regarding the reasoning behind using forward slashes, the Creole creators explain:
A slash (/) looks like slanted italics, so it is intuitive and thus easier to remember.
It would seem that at least a few lightweight markup language creators agree with that reasoning.
I'm not sure why nobody else has mentioned this yet, but in /that/ instance you mentioned, the forward slashes are used to denote emphasis upon a specific word in writing.
"Is there anywhere I /wouldn't/ want to go?" Can also be written as "Is there anywhere I wouldn't want to go?" However, some people are more accustomed to using slashes for emphasis since it may be quicker for them or maybe because they might be typing on something that doesn't support italics, but either way it still effectively puts emphasis on the word since it makes it /physically/ stand out from the rest of the sentence.
Note: I have frequently seen the use of sed's s parameter use slashes. The "sed" command is commonly found in Unix, and is downloadable for Windows. Here is an example:
echo I like blue apples | sed s/blue/red/
(That command will say "I like red apples". The part between the first couple of slashes gets replaced by the part between the next couple of slashes.)
Actually, I could also have said "sed s!blue!red!" because sed doesn't care much about which character is used as a separator, as long as each separator matches the first one used (right after the letter "s" in the parameter). That said, I have seen slashes used as the separator very, very frequently.
Especially when I suspect I am among a Unix-literate group, I might often point out speling errors (as shown in the example).
I know this doesn't precisely match the example you gave, but it is usage that I've seen frequently, so I figured it can be worth being aware of (especially if you did encounter a case of s/old/new/ but just didn't remember the s at the start.
I interpret it as "I am not sure whether to go or not. Do you have a reason that you think would make me NOT want to go? Alternatively, do you have a reason that you think would make me want to go?"
