[marssaxman]

It kind of is, though. Markdown did not start out as a markup language, but as a tool for displaying what was then considered to be plain text which used certain popular style conventions. That is, people wrote "plain text" in markdown style for many years, on mailing lists, in newsgroups, and in doc files, long before the introduction of markdown.pl.

[Shorel]

In mailing lists and discussion groups, they actually used * as bold marker and _ as italics. Something I wish markdown would have used, instead of ** and *.

[oniony]

Back on Fidonet in the 90s, we used *bold*, _underline_ and /italics/. Makes a lot more sense than what we've ended up with today.

[marssaxman]

Hello, fellow old-timer! I think I kind of still mean that when I use that punctuation, even though I know it will be rendered differently.

[rmilk]

Those punctuation marks make sense and came from old-old school notations for typewritten manuscripts. I remember them from my Strunck and White /Elements of Style/ book from English 1A (sorta-old-timer here). Microsoft Office apps still by default apply those marks for you. Quite annoying when you are trying to send an email with a file spec and it bolds things like *suffix.* Edit: and HN does it as well :)