[edsheeran]

Can someone please explain to me what the _underline_ at the beginning and end of a word is supposed to mean? I'm sure it's not proper writing or rule of grammar but I see it frequently in sites where there's a high concentration of techies. Is it some carryover from coding? If so it's bad practice outside of code. Don't stain the standards.

[TeMPOraL]

> Is it some carryover from coding? If so it's bad practice outside of code. Don't stain the standards.

Nah, it's sort of carryover from old days of plaintext e-mails, except we still communicate with plaintext a lot, so it's still relevant. It originates from the same space that gave you ALL CAPS = SHOUTING and emoticons.

Typical emphasis characters are underscore and asterisks. Many software will recognize them. Like Markdown parsers. Or like HN, wich italicizes text between asterisks. Or Skype, which responds both to asterisks, underscores, and then probably some more.

Complaining about this is kind of like complaining about using punctuation in an English sentence. It's not the users who are the problem - it's the other crowd, that doesn't know the rules and traditions of the medium.

[kpil]

And it's most likely a carry over from when typewriters where in use, where you go back and add underscores under the characters by typing over them. Underscores where of course the italics of a typewriter font, unless you had a really fancy typewriter.

On a _terminal_ you can't - or couldn't compose characters, so you add a hint in the front and the end of the word.

Just deal with it.

It's like the characters added for simulated deletion, that jokingly tell other suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H people what you really think. On a suitably incompatible terminal (or vastly overrated editor), this was actually what it looked like when trying to delete text by pressing backspace or some obscure control-character.

Ahh, and simulated hangup noise that you get when you are criticising Hacker New, although that have never happ485734095-.sdf834-...####+3+323803040830

[Kiro]

> Is it some carryover from coding? If so it's bad practice outside of code. Don't stain the standards.

No, it's not but it's funny that you were so sure it was that you put it as a rhetorical question with a nonsense rant about standards.

[mdorazio]

It's to emphasize a word since not all sites allow basic text formatting like italic and bold. As a result, people will use asterisks or underlines to indicate that a particular word is important.

[jaredsohn]

It adds italics in Markdown. Try it out here if you want: https://stackedit.io/editor

It works in Slack and other chat apps, too.