My first reaction on seeing this pinkie tattoo was that the dude who has gotten it has got to be the most coked-out person in the world. And I wasnât entirely wrong I guess. Because the dude who got this curios little ink is a PhD student in Historical Linguistics in Zurich, and this funny little symbol is apparently called a glottal stop (what theâ¦?). Having had an unfortunate and, as you might have guessed by now, unsuccessful run-in with the subject of linguistics, the symbol seemed mighty familiar to me. But to be very honest with you, even if I had remembered that a glottal stop is one of the letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet and is supposed to designate a specific consonant occurring in many languages of the world (I always found the linguistics lectures most sonorous and lullaby-like!) I wouldnât have been able to tell you exactly how you go about identifying this particular sound in common speech. Anyway, kudos to you PhD dude, you have taken nerddom up another notch and we hope to see you getting more linguistically-inspired tattoos, hopefully something more familiar sounding like âf**kâ or âpeaceâ or something.
Source: Carl Zimmer